Seige 
Pte iE, 











ADAM TO 





JOB 





he Representative 
) of the Bible by GrorRGE 
MATHESON pp. LL.D. F.R.S.E. for- 


merly Minister of the Parish of 
St. Bernard’s Edinburgh # $ 


FROM ADAM TO JOB 


HODDER AND STOUGHTON 
NEW YORK AND LONDON 





—— ee 
Sy 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
\ in 2021 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/representativeme01math_0O 


BREE A CE 


By ‘The Representative Men of the Bible’ I 
mean the men of the Bible who represent phases 
of humanity irrespective of place and time; 
and I consider them only in those incidents in 
which they ave thus representative. I offer this 
volume by way of experimental instalment. 
I have exhibited but a single row of figures. 
Should the volume meet with acceptance, I 
may exhibit a second row contemporaneous 
with the first; and ultimately, I should like 
to extend the line into the New Testament. 
It is this anticipation of future work that 
explains the omissions in this volume. You 
may say, Why has /shmae/ been omitted from 
your chapter on Abraham, why have Aaron 
and Balaam been left out of your chapter 
on Moses? It is because I have desired to 
give these a place on their own account and 
have wished to avoid repetition. These studies 
are not historical, they are not critical; they 
are an analysis of the Portraits as we see 


v 





vi PREFACE 


them—without any attempt to inquire how 
or when they came. I have imagined myself 
in a studio, looking at the forms as delineated, 
and simply asking the question, What did the 
artist mean? Personally, I have no doubt 
as to the historical basis for the patriarchal 
life—not to speak of lives further down the 
stream. But I have been actuated in the 
meantime by the desire to find ground that 
is neutral to the two extremes—the Higher 
Criticism on the one hand and the Old 
Orthodoxy on the other. That common 
ground is the fact that the figures are now 
before us, and that, if there be a Revelation, 
it is through them, in the last result, that the 
Revelation must come. Here, for the present, 


hands may be joined, here, for the time, views 


may be united; and those who differ as to’ 


dates and origins can meet in the recognition 
of a spiritual beauty. I have sought to give 
the book a semi-devotional tone by closing 
each chapter with a short invocation or prayer. 
G. M. 


EDINBURGH, 1902, 


CONE INGES 


GH AIP E Ret 


INTRODUG TION RuaeL jen scr bette we 


Cor Ate Teh Roait 
ADAMUCHE CHILD, i ios eoedid aie, 


C HCALP TB Reo rt tT 


ABEL THE UNDEVELOPED, ° a 


GA PTE RLV 


ENOCH THE IMMORTAL, .. 


CHAPTER V 


NOAH THE RENEWER, . 


CHAPTER VI 


ABRAHAM THE COSMOPOLITAN, 


CoH ALP TBR VD 


ISAAC THE DOMESTICATED, 


CHA Pil B.RovV LT 


JACOB THE ASPIRING, 


PAGE 


23 


45 


67 


89 


IIo 


131 


viii CONTENTS 


CHAPTER. IS 


JOSEPH THE OPTIMIST, . . ° 


CHAPTER X 


MOSES THE PRACTICAL, ‘ * * 


Ci ACP Tae Read 


JOSHUA) THE IPROSAIC, Wiis) ke 


CHA Sa 3s eek 
SAMUEL THE SEER, . ° ° . 


Cai APA Brox 


DAVID THE MANY-SIDED, 


CHAPTER XIV 
SOLOMON THE WISE, . . . . 


CHAPTER AV 
ELIJAH THE IMPULSIVE, . . ° 


CHAPTER XVI 
ELISHA THE IMITATIVE, . . : 


CHAPTER XVII 
JOB THE PATIENT, ., , . 3 


218 


239 


261 


283 


304 


326 


349 





GEA Pastaniys 
INTRODUCTION 


IN a previous work I attempted a study of 
the Portrait of Christ, as delineated by the 
Four Evangelists. I propose to stand once 
more in the Great Gallery of the Jewish 
nation and to study for a while those other 
figures which have made the history of ancient 
Israel more familiar to the average man than 
the history of modern England. I would 
come to the new study as I came to the old. 
I would leave historical questions in the back- 
ground. I would not ask what is proved, but 
what is painted. It matters not to me when 
the artist lived; it matters not whether the 
Portrait has been attributed to the real hand; 
it matters not even, to my present purpose, 
whether the events delineated on the canvas 
were reproduced from the actual life. The 
A 


2 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


point is that the Portraits are there, that they 
speak to us from a far past, and that their 
voice, which originally was local and national, 
has in the course of the years become cosmo- 
politan and universal. I want to ask, what do 
they say? When you hear a stir around you, 
caused by certain words that have escaped your 
ear, is not that the question you first ask? 
You do not inquire, who is the speaker? how 
is he dressed? where does he come from? 
You inquire, what has he sazd to raise sucha 
commotion? Solis iti here. We ‘seek the 
reason for a universal interest. That reason 
cannot lie in anything historical. It must lie 
in something which belongs to no special 
date, no particular town, no single land. To 
localise it is to weaken it. To associate it 
with a definite place and time is to lessen 
its interest for the race. The Biblical critic 
may insist on knowing the name of Jacob’s 
wrestling angel; but the man in the Gallery 
is content with the message to the eye, content 
to see the picture and to receive the blessing. 

I intend, then, to study these Portraits, not 





INTRODUCTION 3 \ 


as historical figures, but as art figures. We 
will enter into the Gallery and shut the door. 
We will allow no voices from the outside to 
distract us. We will bring with us no cata- 
logue containi... .uiormation regarding the 
artists. To us there will be but one artist— 
God Almighty. It is the pencil of ¢kzs Artist 
that we will try to trace. We will endeavour 
to detect, not the evidence of local colouring, 
not the vestiges of a special culture, not the 
indications of a life that has passed away, but 
the element in them which is abiding, per- 
manent, the same yesterday and to-day and 
for ever. It is precisely where these Portraits 
desert the sphere of history that they are gveaz, 
It is precisely where the environment of the 
man is dimly seen that the universal element 
in the Picture shines out most clearly and most 
resplendently. It is where I lose sight of the 
manner in which Enoch was translated, in other 
words, it is. where his case ceases to be special, 
that his igure becomes to me a revelation; for 
it is then I appropriate his story as something 
possible for me. It is where I lose sight of 


4 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


Elijah’s chariot that Elijah’s chariot brings 
a message to my soul, for it is then that I read 
in Avs experience a thing which can be repro- 
duced in my own. A revelation from God is 
not a statement of what men omce did; itisa 
statement of what men may always do. There 
lies the power of the Bible ! It is not the 
revelation of something which was once 
revealed to a little band of worshippers ; it is 
a revelation of how God always reveals. It 
is the special announcement of that which is 
not special—of the universal order of God’s 
word and ways to man. It tells not how He 
spoke once, but how He speaks always. It is 
the proclamation that there is spiritual law 
in the natural world, dnd the enumeration of 
those eternal principles by which that law is 
enforced and maintained. The men of the 
Bible Gallery are photographed because they 
are universal men. 

But now a questicn arises. Was Judah the 
best field for the selection of universal types? 
Conceding that the selection has been a 


success, would it not have been more success- 


INTRODUCTION 5 


ful still if it had been made from some other 
sphere? I have often been struck with the 
observation attributed to the outside world 
by the writer of the Acts,‘ Are not these men 
Galileans!’ It was the early expression of 
a feeling which has survived to this day—the 
contempt for provincialism. Galilee was not 
the metropolis; it was a mere province. 
Being but a province, it seemed an unlikely 
sphere for the founding of a universal lan- 
guage. Christianity was attempting to initiate 
a common speech—a cosmopolitan medium 
of intercourse. Why try to inaugurate it in 
the provinces, where men proverbially resist 
a uniformity of standard ; why not begin with 
Jerusalem, where people were more likely to 
think in companies! And what was said 
of the New Testament had been also said 
of the Old. What Galilee was to Judah, 
Judah was to the world—a province. It was 
outside the fashion of the great capitals. It 
was regarded as the abode of a peculiar people 
—a people who had not learned the conven- 
tions of society. Other empires moved in 


6 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


masses; Judah was always a divided land. 
Other empires were subject to a single human 
will; Judah had ever her individual opinions, 
and wavered between her prophet, her priest, 
and herking. Other empires had extinguished 
private judgment, had enjoined conformity toa 
common standard; Judah had proclaimed to 
each separate man that he was personally 
responsible to the King of kings. Was not 
Judah, then, less favourable to permanence? 
Were not her types of mind likely to be more 
transitory, more evanescent, more perishable? 
Was not humanity more likely to be per- 
manently revealed in stereotyped forms of 
fashion, than in the spontaneous outbursts of 
individual independence? 

I answer, No; and in that answer, I have 
touched the secret of the Bible’s appeal to all 
ages. The things which persist throughout 
the history of Man are not the characteristics 
of the race, but the traits of the individual. The 
element distinctive of any one race, however 
long and however extensively it is propa- 
gated, can never furnish a type of universal 


| 
| 


INTRODUCTION y| 


humanity. The men in that race who are 
representative of the world will be precisely 
those who have broken over the traces, who have 
ventured to diverge from the spirit of their 
time. The men who represent humanity are 
just those who have stepped over their bound- 
ary line and dared to revert to the primitive 
type of Nature. Search the galleries of the 
world for an assemblage of representative men, 
you will find it, not in conformity of indi- 
viduals to races, but at the point where the 
man diverges from his race—at the spot 
where he steps out from the environment of 
his birth and reveals himself in the attitude of 
climbing the wall. 

The scene for such a selection, then, is 
always a Galilee—a place where conventional- 
ism is broken, It is a mistake to think that 
Jesus chose the men of Galilee to show that 
the weak things of the world could confound 
the strong. That is not the principle of 
God’s election to azy work. When a Saul 
of Tarsus is chosen to represent humanity, it 
is not because he is weak, but because he is 


8 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


strong—because he has already within him 
the promise and the potency of life. Even so 
were the men of Galilee elected. Their dis- 
tance from the capital of the world was 
acceptable, not as a disadvantage, but as a 
qualification. Jesus was in search of weld 
flowers. He was seeking specimens of unre- 
strained humanity—of humanity uncurbed by 
conventionalism and unmutilated by arti- 
ficiality. He was in quest of the spirit of 
childhood. Why does He place a child in the 
midst of the disciples? Why does He pro- 
claim that such as ¢hese were to represent His 
kingdom? On account of their humility? 
No, but the opposite—on account of their 
greatness. It was because childhood repro- 
duces from age to age that which is distinc- 
tive of MWan—that which is neither Greek 
nor Egyptian nor Roman, but simply human. 
To the eye of Jesus the essential attributes of 
Man were the spontaneous instincts of the 
soul; and He found them in the child. That 
is why His eye rested first on Galilee. It 
was the home of luxuriant human nature. 


INTRODUCTION 9 


Its men and women were overgrown children, 
displaying the primitive types of the heart, 
and therefore revealing that which is eternal 
in Man. To Him Galilee was the real capital, 
and all beside were only provinces; for the 
centre of humanity was to Him the heart ofa 
child, and the key to all success was the 
spontaneous joy of youth. 

In this sense a/so what Galilee was to Judah, 
Judah was to the world; it wasa land of children. 
It was this that made it a land of promise. 
Childhood is distinctively the age that sees 
the promised land. It never looks back, even 
to an Eden; its watchword is ‘to-morrow.’ 
But childhood has another characteristic, and 
it is one more pertinent to the present study. 
It is the age of variety. Ido not think there 
is any period of human life in which the 
attributes of Man are revealed in so many 
different forms. Old age exhibits a general 
uniformity ; the shades of difference are 
tempered down as we reach the valley of life. 
Manhood exhibits a general uniformity; we 
strive to adopt the /fashzon of the day when 


LO THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


the day of life isin its meridian, and nothing 
would so distress us as to be told that we did 
not live as Rome lives. But childhood sings 
the Song of Existence to many variations. 
Childhood reveals human nature in its varie- 
ties. In other periods of existence the tune 
is played on a single instrument. But here 
it rings in a hundred different forms—from 
harp, violin, lute, clarion, trumpet, lyre. 
Here it is shown how unity can exist in 
diversity—how Man can be changeless amid 
the mutable, constant amid the flow. Here 
alone can we look for a representative gallery 
of universal men—a gallery that shall be 
more than local, more than national, more 
than the product of an age and clime—a 
gallery which shall enfold the one in the 
many, and include the many in the life of the 
one. 

Now, in the ancient world, in the pre- 
Christian world, I know of only one such 
gallery—that which contains the Portraits of 
the Jewish nation. Nowhere else do we find 


a gallery representative of man as man, I 





INTRODUCTION 11 


can find galleries representative of man as 
Greek, man as Roman, man as philosopher, 
man as soldier, man as slave—but not else- 
where man as man. And the reason is that 
no other gallery reaches the varzetzes of 
human nature. Variety belongs to the life of 
childhood, and that is precisely what the 
secular nations of the world have not thought 
worth painting. They have confined them- 
selves to the age of manhood, and therefore 
they have entrammelled their pencil. They 
have been limited to one phase of humanity— 
often a temporary phase. Let us look into 
one or two of these galleries of the world 
popularly called heathen. They are all much 
larger than that of the Jew; but they are far 
more easy to scan. When you have seen one 
form, you have seen all; when you have 
studied one, you have studied all. You see 
in each collection but single attitudes of Man 
—the attitude of the nation which has framed 
it. Not any group standing alone, not all the 
_ groups joined together, would suffice to make 
_ the universal type of one human soul. 


12 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


We enter the Chinese Gallery, and survey 
the portraits. What do we find? An enormous 
collection of figures—a collection representing 
a vast empire, but, for that very reason, moZ 
representing humanity. The empire which 
these pictures mirror has all through the ages 
maintained a single attitude—looking Jdack. 
We often speak of the Chinese Empire as in 
a state of stagnancy; and no doubt the descrip- 
tion is true. But it would be a great mistake 
to imagine that the stagnancy of the empire 
has resulted from its want of aspiration. It 
has never been without aspiration. It would 
not be too much to say that its unprogressive- 
ness has come from its aspiration. There is 
an aspiration which retards progress. Ifa man 
is bent upon the worshipping of his ancestors, 
that is a state of aspiration; it is a longing to 
look back. And just for that reason it is 
a state of unprogressiveness; if our treasure is 


in the past, all the instincts of our nature bid 


us linger near it. Our impulse is, if possible, | 


to retreat; if that is impossible, to stand still. 
That is the position of the Chinese Empire 


————_—_— 





INTRODUCTION 13 


Her resistance to progress does not come from 
the absence of an ideal, but from the presence 
of an ideal. Her heart is in the past, and so 
her treasure is in the past. She has noimpulse 
to press forward, because she has no motive to 
press forward. All her flowers have been left 
behind her. Her Paradise is a Garden of 
Eden—a garden at the deginning of things. 
The spectacle at which her eye kindles is not 
one of prospect but one of retrospect. She 
worships her ancestral dead. The Nebo on 
which she stands is not a spot from which she 
beholds a land of promise, but a spot from 
which she sees a land of memory. She does 
stand on a Neboas firmly as ever Moses stood; 
but unfortunately she stands /onger than Moses 
would have stood; she is standing there up to 
this day. And the reason is that she has no 
motive for descending. Canaan is not before 
her; it is behind her. Her vision bids her 
stay—stay near the primitive fountain, stay on 
the confines of a past world. The men in ¢his 
gallery are all looking back; their eye is on 
the morning hills. 


14 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


Let us pass to the Gallery of India, and 
here we find a new phase of Man. It is a 
phase equally one-sided, yet entirely different. 
Here again we see figures in a single attitude; 
but the attitude of India is not the attitude of 
China. If I might be allowed to describe the 
difference epigrammatically, I should say that, 
while the men of China are looking back, the 
men of India are looking upward. The Hindu 
figures have their faces turned toward the 
sun. Their eye rests neither on the past nor 
on the future. It cannot be said to rest even 
on the present. To the men of this gallery all 
time is a delusion. Everything which we call 
the real world is to them wmreal; everything 
which we call unreal is to them reality. Those 
objects which engross the Western mind are 
disregarded by the eye of India. If this were 


a mere difference of ¢aste there would be | 


nothing strange init. But it is nota difference 


of taste; it is a difference of judgment. The 


Englishman and the Hindu are doth in search | 


of a real world. They are both opposed to 
the sway of the imagination; they both seek 


 aitiiend —_— 


INTRODUCTION 15 


a world of prose as distinguished from a world 
of poetry. But the strange thing is that what 
the Englishman calls prose the Hindu calls 
poetry, what the Englishman calls poetry the 
Hindu calls prose. To the man of modern 
London, the prose of life, the reality of life, 
lies in the streets of the great city with their 
buying and selling and chaffering. To the 
man of ancient India, all such spectacles are 
scenes of fancy, of imagination, of poetic 
dreaming. To him the only prose realities 
are the things woz seen, the things transcen- 
dental, the things above. Such a gallery 
could never enfold the world’s representative 
men. It expresses only one attitude —an 
attitude elsewhere rarely found—the face up- 
turned to the height, and the hand outstretched 
to grasp the mist upon the mountains. 

Look next at the Gallery of Greece. It 
depicts a phase of humanity distinct from 
either China or India. Yet equally with them 
it depicts but one phase. If the Chinaman 
looks back, if the Indian looks upward, I should 
lescribe the Greek as looking on-a-level. He 


16 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


aspires in everything to the mzddle course. 
He is ‘moderate in all things. The virtues 

he follows are the sober virtues—prudence, 
temperance, fortitude. He aims at the quali- 
ties that hold an even balance between ex- 
tremes. He prefers friendship to love; it is 
the middle term between the heat and the 
coldness of the heart. He would rather be 

a citizen than the member of a nation, for the 
city is the middle point between the unit and 
the multitude. He neither creeps nor flies; 

he walks; his ideal is ‘the golden mean.’ 
But by this very fact the possibility of a 
universal gallery is excluded. Variety belongs 

to the spirit of the child just because the spirit 

of the child is opposed to the golden mean, — 
Childhood has no half-measures; it is either 
on the hill or in the vale. The mind which 
has always moved on the plain will never 
represent united Man, even though it be thz 
mind of a national hero. Plato was a greateh. 
man than David; but David is a more repre- 
sentative man than Plato. Take away Plato’ , 
works and his figure is a shadow; take awa))\ : 


1 


INTRODUCTION 17 


David’s Psalms, as the critics do, and his form 
remains undimmed. Whence this difference? 
It is because the figure of Plato moves on the 
plain—that plain which favours philosophy but 
impairs biography, while the form of David 
passes from valley to height and so connects 
the extremes of universal Man. 

There is one more gallery at which we may 
look ; it is that of the Roman. Geographically 
speaking, it zs a universal gallery; Rome 
claimed to be mistress of the world. Yet this 
gallery proves how little geographical distri- 
bution has to do with representation. Physi- 
cally, Rome is the capital of the earth; 
mentally, she is only one of the provinces. 
She is as provincial as either China or India 
or Greece. She too presents only one side of 
Man, a single human attitude. Itis a different 
attitude from all the foregoing ones, Let me 
again express myself epigrammatically. If 
the men in the Chinese Gallery are looking 
back, if the men in the Indian Gallery are 
‘ooking upward, if the men in the Greek 
Gallery are looking on-a-level, I would say 
B 


) 
\ 


18 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


that the men in the Roman Gallery are looking 
down. They are looking down at their own 
burden—not at the burden of others. They 
have not reached the stage which Goethe calls 
Man’s reverence for things beneath him; theirs 
is the gaze not of attraction but of repulsion. 
Lord Byron speaks of death as the doom 
Man ‘dreads yet dwells upon.’ Such is the 
Roman’s attitude to the burdens of life. He 
loathes them, but for that very reason he 
cannot take his eyes from them. His whole 
life is a preparation to meet them. His educa- 
tion, his training, his discipline, is deszgned to 
meet them. He is taught to keep his eyes on 
the ground where his burden lies, knowing 
that one day he will have to lift it and bear it. 
For that hour of lifting and bearing he schools 
himself. He hardens his heart to impressions, 
He suppresses feeling. He restrains emotion. 
He cultivates coldness. He lops from his tree 
of life the branches which luxuriate. He 
curbs enthusiasm; he moderates affection ; he: 
clothes his mind in the mantle of the Stoic; 


he practises the presence of calamity. 9 


INTRODUCTION 19 


All these galleries reveal but the acczdental 
features of Man. They are not galleries of 
human nature itself. They are in want of 
variety; and they are in want of variety 
because they are in want of the spirit of 
childhood. But I am now coming into a 
gallery which, smaller than all the others in 
extent, has yet embraced within its compass 
every side of the human soul; I mean the 
Gallery of the Land of Judah. Gathered 
within a narrow space, exhibited to a tiny 
number, unappreciated by most of those 
around them, the Portraits of this Gallery 
are none the less a miniature of Man. They 
are a delineation of the desires and intents 
of the heart throughout the wide world. 
They are no local mirror, no reflection of 
a special place or time. They exhibit not 
the national but the universal. We forget 
that the men were Jews. We forget their 
vicinity to Mount Zion and the Jordan and 
the Temple. We forget even their environment 
lby Asia. We find that they have kept pace 


with Europe. Our shifting western scenery 


20 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


has not made them an anachronism. They 
are abreast of our varieties. They reveal 
human nature not only in its eternal sameness 
but in its eternal variations. And why? 
Because they are all portraits of youth—the 
age of spontaneity. Is not this the very 
ground of national greatness assigned by one 
of Israel’s poets? Speaking of the Messiah’s 
glory he says, ‘Thy people shall be willing in 
the day of Thy power; from the womb of the 
morning Thou hast the dew of Thy youth’— 
the refreshing influence of Thy young men. 
What does he mean but this: ‘That which 
makes this people a representative people is 
its spontaneity—its willingness, and that which 
makes it spontaneous is the everlastingness of 
its spirit of youth. The men of Israel are as 
fresh as morning dew because they have a 
child’s heart in them. They are a nation of 
young men—men of the morning. Obedience 
has not made them slaves; service has not 
robbed them of their elastic spring ; the eden 
and heat of life’s day has not caused them te) 
wax old,’ 


| 


INTRODUCTION 21 


EAD me through the Great Gallery, O 
Lord! On the threshold I wait for Thee! 

Who shall interpret the Gallery “#e Thee! 
Thou who hast the gift of Eternal Life canst 
explain to me how Youth could do so much for 
Man. I ask the powers of Nature why these 
men are still alive; they cannot tell. But Thou 
canst, for their secret is Thy secret. Thou Life 
Eternal, Thou Spirit of Immortal Youth, in 
Thy light would I tread this Gallery, by Thy 
light would I read these Portraits. Go Thou 
on before me, and I will follow Thee; in Thy 
light shall I see light. Lead me from face to 
face, lead me from form to form! Interpret 
for me the features! Explain to me the 
attitudes! Show me the shades of expression; 
reveal to me the colours of the soul! Inspire 
me to perceive the subtle beauties that are hid 
from the common eye! Help me to see why 
the universal man, the Man Christ Jesus, came 
not from China, not from India, not from 
Greece, not from Rome, but from Judah! 
Show me how He was indebted to no foreign 
soil! Teach me how He wreathed into one 


22 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


garland the dispersed flowers of Israel, and 
how all their blossoms are reproduced in Him! 
Then shall I know the artistic plan. Then 
shall I see whither the Portraits are tending ; 
and the secret of their endurance will appear 
when I know them to be tints of the Life 
Eternal. 


CHAR rER T 
ADAM THE CHILD 


I HAVE said that the characteristic of the 
Jewish Portraits is their derivation from the 
period of youth. Unlike any other national 
gallery, the Gallery of Judah has painted her 
sons by the light of morning. The traits it 
has selected are the qualities which other 
nations deem ot great—the qualities which 
mark the early hours. And this chord is 
struck at the very beginning. The Portrait on 
the threshold of the Gallery is that of a child. 
It has the physical height of a man, but its 
mental attitude is that of a child. It isa 
figure representative of all childhood—always, 
everywhere. It is professedly the first figure 
not only of the Hebrew race but of the race of 
Humanity; yet from one point of view it is 


perhaps the least primitive of all forms. We 
28 


24 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


often speak of the story of Adam as a very 
childish narrative. So it is; but why? Be- 
cause it is a description of childhood itself. 
Childhood is a permanent element in the 
human race—as naive and artless to-day as it 
was in the world’s dawn. The man who 
painted Adam mew he was painting a child; 
the simple question is, has he painted a repre- 
sentative child—a child that will stand either 
for Eden or for London? MHas he succeeded 
in photographing that artlessness of thought, 
that nafveté of expression, that simplicity of 
action, which belong to the child normal, the 
child universal? Has he avoided the mistake 
of forgetting this artlessness, of ignoring this 
simplicity? Has he eliminated from life’s 
dawn all ideas which pertain only to the 
afternoon? Is his Picture, in short, childlike 
enough to be universal? 

Do not imagine the delineation of a child’s 
portrait is an easy thing. It is precisely the 
work in which most galleries have failed. 
There have been two extremes to which the 


human artist has been prone; he has either 


ADAM THE CHILD 25 


made too little of the child or he has made too 
much, The Old Pagan world erred on the first 
side. It underrated the importance of child- 
hood as a subject for the gallery. To that old 
world the early years of life were no part of 
history. They were something to get through, 
something to surmount, something to outgrow. 
That the nursery was the making of the man 
did not enter into Pagan calculation. That 
the most important stage of education is that 
preceding the reign of the actual schoolmaster 
was an idea as yet beneath the sea. The 
disciples of Christ murmured at a child being 
put in the mzdd/e of their ring; but the 
disciples of a Pagan sage would have mur- 
mured if a child had been put in their ring at 
all. To them a child was the antithesis of 
wisdom, the opposite of philosophy. He was 
too sensuous for the Platonist, too weak 
for the Roman, too tiny a thing for the 
nations that moved in masses. It was only 
a corner of the gallery that the world we 
call heathen would assign to the figure of 
the child, 


26 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


But if ancient Paganism spoiled the portrait 
of childhood by wnder-colouring, Medieval 
Christianity fell into the opposite extreme—it 
coloured too much. It put into its picture of 
ideal childhood more than belonged. to it. 
Take its earlier portraits of the Babe of Beth- 
lehem. What is their defect? It is just 
their transference to a child of the attributes of 
aman. The artist of that day, the historian 
of that day, thought he was magnifying the 
childhood of Jesus by making it miraculous. 
He surrounded His head witha nimbus. He 
encircled His cradle with prodigies. He im- 
printed on His face what was meant to be 
an expression of glory, but what was really 
an expression of unnaturalness. He put a 
sagacious look in the eyes, a far-seeing thought- 
fulness in the countenance. He stamped upon 
every feature the impress of a heavenly wisdom 
which, if it could only speak, would say won- 
derful things. It was a delineation intended 
to honour the childhood of Christ; in reality, 
it detracted from the swaddling bands of Beth- 


lehem. It was a conception neither esthetic 


ADAM THE CHILD 27 


in art nor reverent in theology. It destroyed 
that very ideal which it was meant to nourish. 
It killed the child by letting in the man. It 
sacrificed the cradle by placing within it, not 
a babe, but a savant. 

I have alluded to these errors with the view 
of showing that the task undertaken by the 
writer in Genesis was by no means an easy 
thing. We speak with much patronage of the 
simplicity of the culture implied in his narrative. 
My formula would rather be that the compara- 
tive maturity of his culture is shown by the 
simplicity of the portrayal. He has done 
what neither the Ancient Pagan world nor the 
Medizval Christian world succeeded in doing. 
He has painted a child—a real child, a type of 
all childhood. He has given us an absolute 
and accurate description of the simplicity of 
a child’s thought, of the crudeness of a child’s 
ideas, of the sequence of a child’s conceptions, 
Do you think he could have done this if he 
himself had not been already standing on 
the 4z//7 ? Do you imagine that it is in the 
valley we see the valley? No, it is from the 


28 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


mountain. A simple mind cannot describe 
simplicity. It can no more describe simplicity 
than a born-blind man can describe darkness 
or a deaf-mute delineate the effects of silence. 
No man can see his lower self except by the 
light of his new morning. The man who 
declares that his righteousness is as filthy rags 
is the man who is already clothed in the best 
robe of his Father’s house; for it is by the 
perfection of the new garment that he learns 
the dilapidation of the old. He who can 
paint a genuine child must himself have far 
ascended the slope of manhood. 

This artist, then, has no prentice hand; his 
is the touch of a master. Nowhere is the 
touch so masterly as where the record seems 
most childish, for that is precisely the aspect 
in which his Picture is most true to the subject. 
There is a great difference between a primitive 
picture and a picture of the primitive. The 
former will be foolish but not childlike; the 
latter will be childlike but not foolish. This 
Portrait of the child Adam is the latter. You 
ask if it is historical. I answer, It has been 


ADAM THE CHILD 29 


again and again historical ; it has been repeated 
in your history and in mine. This child is not 
dead ; it lives in the experience of every human 
soul. It can be verified by the testimony 
of consciousness, Every step of this Garden 
Story is your story. The child Adam is your 
looking-glass—the mirror of your yesterday. 
Come and look into the glass; come and 
survey the mirror! You will read there your 
own biography. It will bea record of child- 
hood no doubt, and, if you will, a childish 
record; but it will not be the less modern, not 
the less cosmopolitan, on that account. The 
record of childhood is never an anachronism. 
Let it be only sufficiently childlike, only 
sufficiently simple, and it will always be abreast 
of every age. The Garden scene has never 
become obsolete. It is not superannuated by 
the flight of years, not antiquated by the 
change of customs, not eclipsed by the growth 
of later things. And the reason is that it is 
planted in that field of humanity whose pro- 
ducts neither grow nor decline—that field of 
childhood whose fruits spring up spontaneously 


30 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


and abide for ever the same. Let us describe 
the portrait of this typical child. 

Not as an absolute beginning does the child 
Adam burst upon our view. We are accus- 
tomed to figure him so. We think of him as 
coming into the world with no experience, as 
bringing upon the scene a mind absolutely 
vacant and waiting for nature to give it a 
character. Not thus does the great artist 
depict this child. He leads upon the stage of 
time no vacant soul, no empty life. He brings 
a child, but not a child without experience. 
Adam begins the world with capital. He is 
the first of his race, yet there is in him a long 
stream of heredity. Nay, there are two long 
streams of heredity. The child Adam comes 
into this world with two worlds already in his 
breast. He enters life with a double bias— 
a bias from earth and a bias from heaven. 
Two elements are in him—not necessarily 
diverse, but different and capable of conflict 
—the dust of the ground and the breath of 
the Father. He does not get his character 
from the Garden ; he gives his character Zo the 


ADAM THE CHILD 31 


Garden. He clothes the grounds of Eden in 
his own attributes—dust and divinity. He 
looks at the trees and says, ‘They are good 
for food, and they are pleasant to the eyes.’ 
There spoke both sides of his heredity — his 
parentage from the earth and his parentage 
from the breath of God. The one was the cry 
of the outer man; the other was a voice of 
the spirit. The one welcomed the Garden as 
a means of sustenance; the other hailed it as 
a source of beauty. The one claimed bread, 
the means of livelihood, the support of the 
physical life; the other expressed its convic- 
tion that Man could not live by bread alone. 
‘Good for food,’ ‘pleasant to the eyes’—it 
was the marriage in one mind, in a child’s 
mind, of the lower and the higher. It was 
the wedding of the Philistine and the Greek, 
the union of prose and poetry, the bridal morn 
of two instincts which few nations have united 
—the pursuit of utilitarian ends, and the repose 
in esthetic pleasures. | 
Now, why do I say that this is a representa- 
tive picture? Because in the dawning con- 


32 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


sciousness of your own infant you will find 
exactly the same mixture of dust and divinity. 
There are two objects which almost simul- 
taneously attract that dawning consciousness 
—the thing which nourishes and the thing 
which shines. The child cries for food; it 
is the voice of the body, the call of the outer 
life—and it breathes a prayer which is common 
to the animal and the man. But there is 
another hunger which has a place in the breast 
of the infant and which in the man is destined 
to acquire a quite special significance; it is 
the hunger of the eye. Pass a shining object 
before the sight of infancy, and the little hand 
will be outstretched to grasp it. The impulse 
which dictates that movement cannot be from 
the dust—not even though it be shared by the 
eye of many a feathered songster. Place it 
where you will, it is the germ of the love of 
beauty, and, as such, it is above the dust. 
Wherever it is found, it is the breath of the 
Father. And itis found in the infant. On the 
very threshold of human existence there is a 
gate called Beautiful side by side with a gate 


ADAM THE CHILD 33 


unadorned. The unadorned gate and the beauti- 
ful gate both open together. The one leads 
to the plain; the other conducts to the moun- 
tain. Seen from each, the Tree of Life looks 
different. From the gate of the plain I see its 
fruits; from the gate of the mountain I behold 
its blossoms. The one gives the view of its uses; 
the other gives a sight of what merchants can- 
not buy. Young Adam ever beholds both. 
But look again at the development of your 
child, and you will see how cosmopolitan is 
this biography of the primeval Adam. I have 
said that the typical child begins with the 
search for that which nourishes and the search 
for that which shines. But there comes a 
phase later than either—the search for that 
which magnifies. If the child begins with the 
hunger of the mouth and the hunger of the eye, 
it passes by and by into a third form of appetite 
—the hunger of the hand. The love of posses- 
sion comes. Adam looks at the tree and 
cries, ‘If I could get up there, I should be as 
high as God.’ There has come to him a new 
instinct—the instinct of ownership. He wants 
C 


34 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


to have the sense of being the proprietor of 
the Garden, the joy of being able to say, ‘It 
is mine.” Any other book than the Bible 
would have made the primal man crouch in 
abject terror before the new-found majesty of 
Nature. But with the Bible the primal man 
is a child—and children are not timid, The 
characteristic of a child is the wish for mastery, 
the desire for superiority. All imitation comes 
from it, and imitation is the earliest step of 
human development. Why does a child imitate 
his playfellow? It is because he sees on the 
Tree of Life a bit of fruit which he himself 
has not got, an experience which he has not 
appropriated. It is a grand stroke in the 
painter of the first man that at any cost he 
feels bound to make him an imitator. When 
he has painted him as the occupant of a soli- 
tary garden where there is none but himself 
and God Almighty, he boldly makes him take 
the Almighty as his model, and expresses the 
child’s inveterate love of possession by causing 
him to look at the topmost branch and say, 
‘If I reach that, I shall be like God.’ 


ADAM THE CHILD 35 


Let us pursue the development. We have 
seen three phases of the child Adam—phases 
reproduced from Paradise to Paris, from Eden 
to England—the sense of want, the sense of 
beauty, and the sense of possession. As yet 
there is a phase which we have mot seen—the 
sense of sin. The reason I take to be that pos- 
session must precede transgression. What is 
transgression? It literally means the stepping 
over into another’s ground. I cannot do that 
until I have reached the idea of a boundary—of 
a disputed boundary. Very finely, to my mind, 
is this thought sketched by the great artist in 
Genesis. The child Adam has stretched his 
hand towards the trees of the Garden and said, 
‘They are mine. Through the cool air a 
voice comes, ‘They are not aé/ yours; it is 
a divided ownership.” With that voice came 
the first possibility of actual transgression—of 
stepping into another’s field. That other was 
here the Creator; there was no rival chz/d to 
say,‘ This part belongs to me;’ therefore the 
Almighty said it. The first thing prohibited 
was trespassing on the Dzvzme field—for the 


36 THE REPRESENTATrIVE MEN 


simple reason that there was no rival human 
field. The earliest moral appeal was an appeal 
to human justice—that is the grand feature of 
the Picture. It is an appeal to the child to be 
just to his Creator. No artistic conception 
was ever more original. It is not a demand 
for reverence, a demand for homage, a demand 
for sacrifice; it is a demand for bare justice. 
‘We parted this field between us, you and 
I; let us keep to our contract! I gave you 
one side of the Garden; I retained the other 
You had the Tree of Life; I had the Tree of 
Knowledge. Why should you break over the 
prescribed limits! Is it not enough to have 
dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl 
of the air and the cattle of the meadow; why 
should you claim an empire in the realm of 
the unseen!’ 

I have emphasised this point because I think 
it is the one point where the Picture has been 
misunderstood. The common view is that the 
artist is describing a case of mere disobedience. 
I do not think that is the deepest idea of the 
Picture. I hold that the primitive narration 


ADAM THE CHILD 37 


has attached itself, not to the portrayal of 
obedience, but to the portrayal of justice. 
It is not a question of resistance to Divine 
authority ; it is a question of interference with 
Divine possession. God, for the moment, has, 
in the view of the artist, ceased to be a 
sovereign; He has become the co-partner in 
an estate by reason of His own contract. He 
has divided His inheritance with the child 
Adam; He has apportioned the limits within 
which each shall rule. But the child Adam is 
restive under the contract. He would fain be 
uncontracted, he would fain be free. He is 
offended by the /zmzt¢ to his sway. He objects 
to a partition wall between the two rows of 
trees. He is bent on trespassing, on claiming 
the whole Garden for himself. The law which 
he seeks to violate is not a law of authority; 
it is a law of justice, of equity, of the relation 
of meum and tuum. ‘That is, in my view, the 
meaning of this old Picture. Milton has told 
us that the secret of Paradise lost was ‘Man’s 
first disobedience and the fruit of that for- 
bidden tree.’ I do not think that is the secret 


38 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


which the painter had in his mind. To him 
the central thought was not the violation of 
authority, but the violation of justice. It is 
not the dependant forgetting the respect to his 
master ; it is the partner ignoring his contract, 
the associate breaking his bond, the sharer of 
dual rights attempting to encroach upon the 
rights of the other. 

Now, I appeal to you who have studied 
the life of the nursery, if this is not the real 
beginning of the moral training of every 
child. You cannot teach your child morality 
by teaching it obedience. Obedience is in 
itself neither good nor bad—may be ezther 
good or bad; it depends upon whom we obey. 
Nor is the quality which you desire for your 
child that of absolute obedience. There is 
not a mother in the land who does not long 
for the day when the actions of her child shall 
cease to be dictated by her own will. The 
dearest moment to the heart of a parent 
is the moment of a child’s spontaneity—the 
day when it anticipates the ordinary command 
and does the deed of its own accord. What 


ADAM THE CHILD 39 


ts the joy of that moment to the parental 
heart? It is the recognition that the reign 
of absolute obedience is past and that the 
reign of volition has begun. It is the per- 
ception that the child has ceased to be a 
subordinate and has become an equal—ani- 
mated by the same motive, inspired by the 
same will. I have been greatly struck by the 
traces of this parental instinct even in the 
earliest delineation. When I am told that ‘the 
Lord God brought every beast of the field to 
Adam to see what he would call them,’ what 
does that mean? What else than this, that 
obedience is not enough for the heart of a 
father! Why does not the artist paint the 
Divine Father as dictating to the child the 
names of the creatures? Because he knows 
human nature, Divine nature, better than that. 
He knows that the sweetest music to any 
parent is the voice of the child’s co-operation, 
and that the summer of a father’s love is 
perfected in the hour when the relation of 
authority is superseded by the sympathy of 
communion, 


40 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


Obedience, then, is not the beginning of a 
child’s morality. What zs the beginning? I 
say it is justice, the inculcation of fairplay. 
Whether in the garden or in the playground, 
it is the primary moral lesson of youth. The 
difference between his and yours is the first 
thing which your child should know. Let 
him see the limits of his own Eden. Put him 
in a garden where there is a divided posses- 
sion. Tell him to make an impartial division of 
the trees. Insist that he shall share the fruits 
with his playmate or brother. Impress him 
with the injustice of trespassing, transgressing, 
overstepping his own property. Never pro- 
hibit for the sake of prohibition. If you want 
to forbid the use of any tree, let it be for the 
reason that the tree belongs to another. Pro- 
hibition in itself is not helpful to the child 
any more than the maiming of a wing is 
helpful to the bird. But justice zs helpful. 
Justice is worth the maiming of a wing. 
Justice sanctifies prohibition. To teach your 
child justice, the shutting of one door upon 
its liberty is a small price to pay. The 


ADAM THE CHILD 41 


forbidden fruit becomes then the fruit of 
knowledge. 

This is my philosophy of the Garden of 
Eden, and I am convinced it was the philo- 
sophy of the artist. The temptation of young 
Adam is the temptation to his justice; the 
fall of young Adam is his fall from the hezght 
of justice. With the theology that has circled 
round the Picture I have here noconcern. I 
will only say that a fall from the height of 
justice is the most contagious fall which can 
be conceived. If the sin of the first man lay 
in the breach of a contract which he believed 
to be binding, I can understand why the spirit 
of his deed should have been propagated 
from age to age. I cannot understand why 
an act of disobedience should have been pro- 
pagated, for the simple reason that it zs an 
act. Deeds, as such, are not transmittable; 
my blood alone can flow into the heart of 
my descendants. The emotions of the hour 
are not transmittable; they would require to 
be transmitted for many hours through many 
generations. But injustice is not a deed, not 


42 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


an emotion ; it is a full-fledged spirit. It is 
as full-fledged after a single deed as after 
years of unrighteousness. An act of injustice 
is never the beginning of a process; it is 
always a culmination, an acme, a climax. 
An act of disobedience zs a beginning, a first 
step. But an act of injustice only comes 
when the spirit of injustice is full grown. It 
presupposes a long train of dishonest thoughts. 
The most dangerous looks which Adam cast 
on the coveted tree were not the looks of 
the eye; they were the glances of the heart. 
Our coveted trees are never so tempting 
as when they are seen in imagination; it 
is there the fruit looks luscious, it is there 
the branches seem splendid. The actual 
climbing of this tree was to young Adama 
moral bagatelle. He had been up, in fancy, a 
hundred times. He had robbed the orchard 
where the law could not reach him — in his 
heart. The serpent which tempted him was 
within; he had yielded before he touched 
the tree. His real fall was dishonesty of 
thought. The moment he considered the 


—_ —-_ 


—--- =, 


ADAM THE CHILD 43 


chances of detection, he had already fallen ill 
—ill with a thoroughly contagious disease, 
with a malady full-grown. This child, like 
every after child, has his tragedy inside, his 
dramatic personages inside, his dialogues in- 
side. I do not think the tragedy would be 
less complete if the outward deed had been 
omitted ; for the final act of injustice, in the 
sight of heaven, is ever consummated in 
the region of the soul. 


ORD, let me not forget 7%y share in life’s 
garden! Let me remember to make all 

its fruits ‘ fruits of the spirit’! Let me not ask 
only if the tree is good for food, or pleasant 
to the eyes, or a source of human dignity; 
let me inquire also if it can minister to Love! 
If I forget that, I am not just to Zee; I am 
stealing Zhy part of the fruit. Thou hast 
not denied to me the human side of the 
garden. Thou hast allowed me to seek the 
food; Thou hast permitted me to see the 
beauty ; Thou hast authorised me to feel the 


44 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


dignity. But is there to be no share for Thee 
—for Love! Am I never to ask how this 
fruit shall pass from my hand into another 
hand! Am I never to ponder how I shall 
send it down the ages! Am I never to 
inquire whether it can gladden parched lips 
or cheer the couch of an invalid! If not, I 
am stealing the fruit from Zee. I say the 
tree is pleasant to my sight; it is well; Thou 
wouldst not have it otherwise. But am I 
never to consider the lane and alley! Am I 
never to ask whether the green leaf can be 
brought to weary eyes, to hearts that are 
strangers to the leisure hour! If not, I am 
stealing the leaf from Thee, robbing the 
orchard on the side of Love. Make me 
just to Z/y vineyard, O Lord! Shall all my 
prayers be for Eshcol! Shall I have no 
palms for Elim! Shall I have no tree for the 
waters of Marah! Shall I have no manna 
for my brother’s desert! Shall I have no 
leaves whose mission is the healing of the 
nations! Then Eden itself to me will be 
Paradise lost. 


GHAPPER ITI 
ABEL THE UNDEVELOPED 


THE second figure in the group of the Great 
Gallery is Abel. One of the spectators in 
that Gallery, the writer of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews, has distinctly declared him to have 
been among the world’s representative men. 
‘By faith he being dead yet speaketh.’ The 
idea is clearly that of timelessness. It is 
suggested that the man has not become an 
anachronism, that at the time when this spec- 
tator lived his voice was quite a modern voice. 
It had not become superannuated. He had 
personified something which did not pertain to 
any special age, something which was cosmo- 
politan and therefore everlasting. Other 
things had ‘waxed old’ and were ‘ready to 
vanish away.’ Much in the past was but a 


‘shadow, and had shared the evanescence of a 
45 


46 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


shadow. But the Portrait of this man revealed 
a quality which was vital to humanity, whether 
Jewish or Pagan or Christian. It had revealed 
something which belonged, not to any par- 
ticular form of worship, but to worship itself— 
to the religious instinct in all its forms of life 
and in all its stages of progress. By that 
cosmopolitan quality Abel was kept alive— 
alive amid the changing environment, alive 
amid the traces of the dead; he has a present 
voice, he yet speaketh. 

What zs this quality of which Abel is the 
inaugurator, and by whose inauguration he 
lives? The spectator I have quoted says it 
is ‘faith, and he defines faith to be ‘the 
evidence of things not seen.’ It is belief which 
is in advance of experience. To say that a 
man ‘died in faith’ is, with the writer of the 
Epistle to the Hebrews, equivalent to saying 
that the man’s experience was arrested before 
it reached its full development.1 When Abel 

1 Though the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews applies 


the phrase to the whole Gallery, Abel’s early death is evidently 
to him a case of sfecia/ immaturity. 


i ee 


oe 


ABEL THE UNDEVELOPED 44 


is called the first man of faith, it is implied 
that he died too soon for realisation, that he 
did not live to see the fulfilment of his plans, 
that his sun went down while it was yet noon. 
Abel, in short, is the type of the undeveloped. 
If the figure of Adam represents the child, the 
figure of Abel represents the man arrested in 
his youth. He stands for the life interrupted, 
the life cut short. Heis the unfinished build- 
ing, the incomplete work, the fragment of an 
unrealised whole. We feel, in looking at him, 
what we feel in reading the beginning of a 
book which its author has not lived to finish— 
a sense of what might have been, of possible 
work not done. His very name expresses the 
thought of evanescence; it signifies ‘ breath,’ 
‘vapour, ‘vanity. He has come down to us 
as the type of the unsurviving class, of the 
unfit class, of the invalid class. He is the 
forerunner of those who physically are driven 
to the wall. 

The startling thing is that the Bible should 
have put such a form on its canvas. No other 
gallery would have done that. On every 


48 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


other canvas the forms inscribed are the 
forms of the physical survivor. Here the type 
selected is that of the class outstripped in 
the outward race. And the most remarkable 
thing is that the Bible Gallery has made this 
choice not unconsciously, but deliberately. 
Abel’s is not an accidental portrait; it is the 
result of a preference. He gets a more 
prominent place in the Gallery than his elder 
brother. For he as an elder brother, a 
brother who, in addition to his seniority, is 
in every respect more suited to his age. If 
Abel is physically weak, Cain is physically 
strong. If Abel seems behind in his earthly 
work, Cain appears to be in advance with his. 
‘I have gotten a man from the Lord, cries his 
mother while yet he was a child. From the 
world’s point of view Cain was a precocious 
child, suggesting that the man had already 
begun. Ashis form stands before us we feel 
that he is exactly the man who in his own day 
was fitted to win. And in his own day he 
does win. Abel has no chance with him. He 
monopolises by main force. He utilises for 


ae 


ABEL THE UNDEVELOPED 49 


his own advantage all the gifts of life. He 
builds a city. He founds a dynasty. He 
inaugurates a civilisation. He becomes the 
progenitor of those who forge weapons of war. 
His name is caught up by the earliest poetry ; 
his deeds are sung to the primitive music. 
He belongs to the world’s physical side, and 
therefore he is distinctively the prominent man 
of his time. 

Yet he is not the prominent man in the 
Gallery. The artist of later days has hung his 
Portrait high. The place he had among his 
contemporaries is refused him by the Great 
Academy; it is assigned to his unobtrusive 
brother. In the light of posterity Abel is the 
commanding figure. It is the lowest hung of 
the two Portraits. And it is so for the reason 
that it is deemed more modern than that of 
Cain, ‘He being dead yet speaketh. From 
an earthly point of view, his life was short, his 
work interrupted, his mission a failure. From 
the Divine side, his life was long, his work 
continuous, his mission a grand success. He 
is the representative of all the great who die 

D 


50 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


young. The Picture is meant to declare that 
no really great work is ever interrupted. The 
voice of Abel’s blood is described as crying 
from the ground. It is a fine picture of the 
permanence of his work. Dead, buried, for- 
gotten by his contemporaries, this man is 
declared to be speaking from beneath the very 
soil that had covered him! His life-work, 
seemingly arrested, is going on underground! 
As by an unconscious cerebration, it is 
influencing the years! Unseen, unnoted, 
unreckoned with amid the factors of human 
progress, it is exerting a force whose silence is 
equalled by its strength and which is destined 
one day to flash before the eyes of men! 

And indeed it has been so. This under- 
ground voice of Abel has been the germ not 
only of the Hebrew nation, but of the deepest 
life of humanity. What is that work which 
peculiarly marks the Jewish nation? It is the 
elaboration of a system of sacrifice. That 
system seemed to spring spontaneously from 
the dust. But dd it? Was the sacrificial life 
of Israel indeed a sudden thing, a thing unpre- 


= ge 


ABEL THE UNDEVELOPED 51 


pared for in the history of the past? No, says 
the Great Gallery, it had its root in the life of 
an individual man, a man little known in his 
day and little seen by his generation, yet 
sowing below the soil seed that refused to die. 
His voice was drowned during life; but he spoke 
after death. He was early compelled to rest 
from his labours; but his works followed him. 
His memory completed what he himself had 
left unfinished. His influence worked under- 
ground. His image, cherished at first by only 
a few hearts, moulded these hearts and spread 
beyond them. His example created imitators. 
The leaven permeated the mass. The ideal 
he had left behind kindled a spark. It first 
scintillated, then shone, then blazed. It 
became a candle with Abraham, a lamp with 
Moses, a fire with the prophets of Judah, until 
at last it burst into a conflagration on the 
summit of the Hill of Calvary. 

Such I conceive to be the place given to 
Abel in the Great Gallery. It is the place of 
a germ-cell—the germ-cell of that particular 


spirit of sacrifice which, originally peculiar to 


52 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


the Jewish nation, has ultimately given its law 
to man as man. Come, then, and let us look 
at this germ-cell—this thing by which the dead 
Abel yet speaketh. Let us stand before the 
Picture and study its simple features; their 
simplicity may give us light. There are some 
who profess to read human history by the 
hand; I will try to read ¢hzs history by the 
Picture. By the aid of imagination I will 
endeavour to weave together those threads of 
the narrative which are presented loose and 
scattered. Imagination contributes to reality 
if it can supply the missing links in fact. My 
object is to detect, if possible, the meaning 
which the artist had in view. The rough 
sketch meant more to him than it does to us. 
If we can disentangle that meaning, we shall 
have reached the secret of that idea which 
has made Abel’s Portrait the picture of a 
representative man. 

I have said that the Portrait of the primeval 
Adam reveals a mixture of dust and divinity. 
Here the dust and the divinity again meet us, 
but they are no longer combined in a single 


ABEL THE UNDEVELOPED 53 


life; they reappear in the two contrasted 
lives—Cain and Abel. Cain is a child of the 
dust ; Abel is a product of the Divine breath. 
Cain views the field as a source of food; Abel 
contemplates it as pleasant to the eyes. Nor 
alone does the contrast lie in secular things; 
it distinguishes the religion of the men. Both 
the brothers are religious, so far as the form 
of worship is concerned. Both offer a sacrifice 
to the Lord; both offer an appropriate sacri- 
fice. Each gives the fruit of his own profession. 
Abel is a shepherd ; it is right that his offering 
should be from the fold. Cain is an agricul- 
turalist; it is well that his gift should be from 
the soil. Zzhzs side of the contrast is only 
proper; it grows out of their respective call- 
ings. The difference between the dust and 
the divinity does not lie in the diversity of 
these men’s gifts, but in the diversity of their 
spirit. The eye of an outward observer could 
have detected no difference in quality. The 
writer to the Hebrews says so. He says it 
was ‘by faith’ that Abel offered a better 
sacrifice than Cain. What he means is that 


54 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


it was faith that made the betterness. The 
comparison was not between gift and gift; it 
was between soul and soul. It was not 
grounded on the relative value of the animal 
and the vegetable; it was based on the fact 
that the human was better than either—that 
the surrender of a man’s life to God is a more 
acceptable service than all the produce of the 
fields or all the cattle of the meadows. The 
whole point of the narrative lies in the superi- 
ority of a human offering. Let me try to 
reproduce what I conceive the thought of the 
artist to have been in depicting the attitude 
of these two brothers. 

I figure Abel going into the field and thus 
with himself communing: ‘This is indeed a 
beautiful world! I have heard in my childhood 
that the footsteps of the Lord God used to be 
audible in the cool of the day. I donot wonder 
they were; I only wonder they are not heard 
still. I am sure the Lord God is walking still; 
I have faith enough in Him to believe Zhazt. 
Why, then, do I not hear Him? The fault 
must be in me. My ear must have become 


ABEL THE UNDEVELOPED 55 


dull to the heavenly movement by listening 
too much for the sounds of earth. Is it not 
that I have been growing too selfish? My 
flocks have been increasing, and so has my 
joy of possession. I have been so busy in 
counting the number of my sheep that I have 
not heard the sweep of my Father’s garment 
passing by. This ought not to be. If I 
were to sacrifice something of this selfish life, 
I wonder if the sound of the footsteps would 
come back. If I were to select a portion of 
this treasured wealth of mine and offer it as a 
gift to God, would there not be a chance that 
I should hear once more the music which long 
ago was wont to haunt the dell! I will try. I 
will attempt to atone to the Lord God for 
this selfish life. I will sacrifice to Him the 
best part of my worldly gains. I will remove 
from my sight, from my hearing, that which 
curtains eye and ear from Him; and when the 
door of my heart is opened, it may be that 
He will reveal the presence which I know is 
there.’ 


Cain aiso goes out into the field ; and think- 


56 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


ing of his crops, with himself he thus dis- 
courses: ‘How dependent we all are on wind 
and weather! It would bea pity if anything 
happened to spoil the harvest! Would it not 
be well that I should try to propitiate the 
great Power that rules the elements! I have 
heard that to gain God’s favour is to gain the 
world. I have been told that when God was 
acknowledged as the planter of the trees, man 
was made wonderfully happy—that he was 
placed in a Paradise of fruits and flowers, 
where rivers clear as crystal traversed lands 
rich with gold. Was not the prize worth 
the homage! Would it not repay me to 
make an offering to the Lord of some pro- 
duce of my soil! It would be a sacrifice 
to-day, but it would bring gain to-morrow. 
It would not only avert calamity, but increase 
my store. It is a highly profitable thing to 
save one’s soul if thereby he gain the world. 
I will not murmur to yield this oblation to 
the Lord God, for I shall get it back, in 
interest, tenfold.’ 


The offerings are made, and each brother 


ABEL THE UNDEVELOPED 57 


retires to his home. Time passes; and by 
and by there happens a strange thing. These 
brothers meet with opposite destinies. Abel 
has a splendid year; his flocks are multiplied, 
his cattle are on a thousand hills. Of course 
this is not an answer to his sacrifice, nor does 
he take it as such. He has received the only 
answer he wanted—an increased sense of God’s 
presence. Yet to the eye of Cazz it looks as 
if his brother had been answered by material 
prosperity. And what about Cain himself? 
He has experienced another fate than that of 
Abel. For him the wheel of fortune has 
turned the opposite way. The winds of Nature 
have been adverse; great rains have blighted 
the produce of the fields; fierce storms have 
swept the horizon; floods have accompanied 
the time of ingathering; disease has laid its 
hand upon the crops; the harvest has been a 
miserable failure. Cain is filled with indigna- 
tion. His is the anger of a man defrauded. 
Had he not invested his money in a bank that 
promised good interest! Had he not presented 
a gift to the Lord God with a view to achieving 


58 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


worldly success! Was this fair treatment from 
the Lord God! Was he to get no equivalent 
for his sacrifice! Had he not given up the 
best fruits of his last year’s harvest! Would 
aman do that for nothing! If he served God, 
was he not entitled to a service from God! 
Was it right that a man who had been so 
liberal with his means should be rewarded 
with blight and mildew! Did he not well to 
be angry! 

The artist, in Genesis, declares that Cain 
was under an error of judgment. Have you 
ever considered the fine expostulation which 
he puts into the mouth of the Lord God, 
‘Why art thou wrathful, and why is thy 
countenance fallen; if thou doest well, shall 
thy countenance not be uplifted!’ What is 
the meaning of these words? I understand 
them to mean this: ‘Cain, you are mistaking 
the terms of your own investment. You 
expected to receive interest for your sacrifice. 
You were right; true sacrifice always brings 
its interest. But what zs the interest of true 


sacrifice? Is it houses and servants and lands; 


ABEL THE UNDEVELOPED 59 


is it flocks and herds; is it fruits and trees? 
No; it is the uplifting of the countenance, 
There is only one sign of the acceptance of a 
sacrifice; it is the inward joy of the offerer. 
Not the clearing of clouds from the sky—even 
though they de cleared—is the mark of My 
favour; not the presence of clouds in the sky 
—even though they de present—is the mark of 
My distance. The test of My nearness to your 
brother is not the riches of his pastures; the 
test of my absence from you is not the scanti- 
ness of yourcrops. The interest to be reaped. 
from sacrifice is not the bright sky, but the 
bright face; if your countenance is fallen, you 
may be sure that at the door of your sacrifice 
there is lurking some secret sin.’ 

But the narrative says this reasoning is 
beyond Cain. To him the aggravation is not 
so much his failure as the fact that he has 
failed where his brother has succeeded. As 
the firstborn, he can brook no such superiority. 
How deep is this picture of envy! Could 
any zyvo have painted it! Think of the bold 
paradox of making the first scene of inhumanity 


60 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


arise in the sphere of religion! Think of the 
mental acumen implied in the discernment 
that envy is not so much your wish to get a 
thing as the wish that J should zo¢ get it! 
Very striking seems to me this latter point. 
Cain has positively nothing to gain by the sup- 
pression of Abel. What would the shepherd’s 
life be to Azm! His line of livelihood lay in 
another direction. The wealth of Abel would 
have been useless in his hands. It was no 
object of Azs ambition to lead the sheep by the 
green pastures and beside the still waters. 
What riles him in the sight of his brother's 
wealth is not the possession, but the prestige. 
There lies the sharp distinction between envy 
and covetousness. Covetousness is for things; 
envy is for persons. Covetousness is the wish 
to possess; envy is the wish to dzspossess. 
Covetousness is your desire to win; envy is 
your desire that 7 should Jose. Cain has begun 
with covetousness; he has developed into envy. 
His sacrifice has been prompted by avarice; 
his aversion to his brother has not. He has 
passed from the mark of the beast to the 


ABEL THE UNDEVELOPED 61 


number of the beast. The mark of the beast 
is the indulgence of self; the number of the 
beast is the exclusion of others—it is Number 
One. The sin of the Garden has become 
procreative. Adam had been content to say, 
‘All these things shall be mine’; Cain has 
reached the darker thought, ‘They shall at 
least not be my brother’s.’ 

And now comes the final scene of the 
Picture. We have seen Abel alone in the 
field ; we have seen Cain alone in the field; we 
now see both in the field—they ‘talk together,’ 
What do they talk about? I can imagine; 
and I think my imagination expresses the 
thought in the mind of the artist. I conceive 
the following dialogue. Cain says, ‘ You shall 
make no more offerings to the Lord God; I 
am the eldest born, and to me belongs the 
right to sacrifice.’ Abel answers, ‘I dare not 
concede the privilege of personal approach to 
God” ‘A privilege for you zzdeed, sneers 
Cain its bas “added to yyour sheepfold!? 
‘Nay,’ answers Abel, ‘I offered sacrifice just 
to save me from holding such things to be 


62 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


privileges of religion; my offering was meant 
to wean me from the fold.’ ‘Then,’ cries the 
elder brother, ‘you were praying against me, 
praying me down. You have been winning 
the love of the Lord God by the pretence of 
a disinterested devotion. You have been 
setting your romance against my reality, and 
with success. My crops have faded and your 
flocks have flourished; you have been the 
thorn to my rose. Desist, I say, from these 
detrimental prayers! Throw down your 
domestic altar of self-immolation! Cease to 
be a barrier to my gains! I will tolerate no 
current running counter to mine!’ Cries 
Abel: ‘I dare not disobey my conscience—not 
for the love of gold, not for the fear of you. 
Your sacrifice is a mockery, because it is a 
merchandise. It deserves nothing du¢ the 
famine; it could reap nothing but the blight. 
I do not wonder that yours has been this year 
a barren harvest.’ But even while he speaks 
he reels backward. A blow from his brother’s 
hand has struck him—swift, impetuous, pas- 
sionate. He staggers, he falls, striking his 


ABEL THE UNDEVELOPED 63 


head in a vital part; he rises no more; he seals 
his conviction with his blood. 

Now, the point of the Picture lies in the fact 
that this martyrdom was an arrest of develop- 
ment. In the view of the artist, in the view of 
the early spectator, Abel has not finshed his 
work of sacrifice. It is only a germ-cell that 
has appeared when he is called away. That 
critic of the Gallery to whom I have already 
alluded has put it very tersely and very finely. 
Looking at the Portrait of Christ, he cries, 
‘We are come to the blood of sprinkling, which 
speaketh better things than that of Abel.’ 
Language could not more clearly express the 
incipient nature of Abel’s sacrifice. Why is the 
blood of Christ declared to be a better offering 
than the blood of Abel? Because Christ’s is 
‘the blood of sprinkling.’ It is not merely 
shed; it is shed on others, shed /or others. 
Abel’s is not a ‘blood of sprinkling.” It is a 
beautiful offering, an inward offering, a spiritual 
offering, but not yet an impersonal offering. It 
is a sacrifice for the wellbeing of his own soul, 


but not for the souls of posterity. He desires 


64 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


communion with his God, a sense of personal 
fellowship with the Author of his being ; he 
has rightly discerned the things that belong 
to his peace. But he has not discerned the 
things that belong to the peace of coming 
Jerusalems. Equally with Cain he would per- 
haps have said, ‘Am | my brother’s keeper!’ 
His was a protest in favour of the higher over 
the lower life; a protest against utilitarian 
worship, against buying and selling in the 
temple of God. But it was his owm higher 
life that he vindicated. He broke the box of 
ointment, but its fragrance did not yet fill the 
House of Humanity; it was not a gift for the 
prospective world. He was beyond his times, 
for his times were the times of Cain; but his 
march was arrested midway before he was 
able to attain the times of Jesus. 


THANK Thee, O Lord, that the Great 
Gallery has enshrined a form which the 
world thought unfit for survival. I thank Thee 
that man’s judgment has not been the final 


ABEL THE UNDEVELOPED 65 


judgement. I thank Thee that in the many 
mansions of this Gallery Thou hast prepared 
a place for what I called failure. Abel would 
never have been one of my representative 
men; I should have chosen Cain as the ‘man 
from the Lord.’ I have no place in my philo- 
sophy for the bud which has never flowered. 
I have no niche in my gallery for the life 
that has been only promise. But Thou hast 
enshrined the bud that the storm forbade to 
flower ; Thou hast preserved on the canvas the 
life of unfulfilled destiny. Thou hast taught 
me that the dead can speak, that the work 
need not end when the life has closed. Thou 
hast taught me that the influence can outlive 
the hand that shed it. Thou hast taught me 
that much of this world’s work is done by the 
departed—that we live by the afterglow of 
many ‘vanished days. Help me to remember 
the afterglow! When I see lives interrupted 
and am tempted to say, ‘To what purpose is 
this waste!’ help me to remember the after- 
slow! Help me to remember that the shed 
blood cries to 7hee, that the interrupted life 
E 


66 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


works for Thee! Help me to remember that 
among the forces of earth there is none more 
potent than that of those whom we call the 
dead! So, in the time of depression, when 
men point to the unfinished glory and say, 
‘Where is the providence of God!’ I will 
look at the Picture in the Gallery and answer 
‘He being dead yet speaketh.’ 


CHAPTER IV 
ENOCH THE IMMORTAL 


STANDING in the Great Gallery, we have seen 
that the two first figures of the group bear 
the impress of youth, The first represents 
the spirit of childhood—the child of all times 
and of all places. The second represents 
the life unfinished, the life that has not 
seen its meridian sun, and whose work re- 
mains a fragment; this also is a morning 
view. We are now come to the study of a 
third figure; it is that of Enoch. Again we 
are in the light of the morning, in the atmo- 
sphere of youth. I have said that the charac- 
teristic of youth is to look forward, that it is 
distinguished by the absence of retrospect. 
Enoch is the representative of this morning 
attitude of life. His eye is on the west—on 


the glory of the evening sun; only, it is not 
67 


68 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


contemplated as a settzmg. The gates of the 
eastern Paradise have closed behind him, 
but he turns not back to look at them. The 
rivers that issued from Eden are still beside 
him, but his gaze is not on these. He has 
forgotten yesterday, he has become oblivious 
of to-day ; he is straining towards to-morrow. 

Enoch is the universal symbol of Man’s 
immortal hope. In the view of that old world, 
he is the man who escaped the sight of 
death. Examine your own hope of immor- 
tality in your most hopeful moments, and you 
will find that the experience you seek is the 
experience of Enoch. In your most vitalised 
hours your protest is not so much against 
annihilation as against the existence of 
death at all. What in such hours you wish 
to see is not merely a vision of something 
beyond the grave; it is a transfiguration of 
the grave itself. What you hope to find is, 
that death, as we understand it, has proved 
to be a delusion—that from the inside it has 
a totally different aspect from that which it 
presents to the outward eye. It is a very 


ENOCH THE IMMORTAL 69 


remarkable circumstance and has often struck 
me as not merely accidental, that the full- 
fledged hope of Christian Immortality has 
reproduced the primitive hope expressed in 
the translation of Enoch. ‘He that liveth 
and believeth in me shall never die,’ is the 
utterance in which Christ’s latest Gospel 
reveals the sense of Immortality. Is it not the 
same hope which centred round the person- 
ality of Enoch! It is not simply the solace 
that beyond the valley and the shadow there 
are mansions of abiding glory. It is the 
proclamation that for the spirit of Man the 
valley itself may be exalted and the shadow 
transfigured into asunbeam, The watchword 
of Christianity is the initial word of the Book 
of Genesis—‘ Eternal Life ’—not ‘life re- 
stored, not ‘life resuscitated,’ but ‘life eternal.’ 
There are many watchwords between; but 
the first is like the last. The initial note of 
immortality which is struck in the narrative 
of Enoch is the latest chord which vibrates in 
the teaching of the Son of Man. 

I do not think we have sufficiently grasped 


a 


7o THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


the significance of this fact in relation to the 
hope of the Old Testament. We think of the 
Portrait of Enoch as a thing which has no 
national bearing. We think of it as the 
individual freak of a peculiar artist who 
tried to paint a future life which his nation 
did not believe in. On the contrary, I think 
the narrative of Enoch’s translation expresses 
the earliest conviction of the united Hebrew 
race. We have become so accustomed to 
believe in the late development of the Jewish 
faith in immortality, that we have come to 
look upon the narrative of Enoch as an ex- 
crescence. I hold, on the contrary, that the 
latest growth was the thing earliest planted, 
and that the belief in Eternal Life had its 
flower in the Gospel just because it had its 
root in the genesis of the Jewish common- 
wealth. For, be it observed that this earliest 
picture of immortality is the picture of 
Eternal Life. It is not resurrection; it is 
not even the awakening out of sleep. It is, 
in the strictest sense, immortality—undying- 
ness. It is the record concerning a man 


ENOCH THE IMMORTAL m1 


whose animation was never suspended—not 
for an hour, not for a moment. It is the 
exhibition of one whose life on earth was so 
full of God that what we call death took 
for him the form of transition. That is what 
the large majority of Christian men and 
women among us actually hope for—that 
there may be a life within them whose con- 
tinuity shall not be broken by the hand of 
Death. And what has its sublimest con- 
summation in the Christian consciousness had 
its crude form in the Portrait of Enoch. 
That Portrait was God’s message of universal 
hope. Every man of the future aspired to be 
an Enoch. Every man strove to light a torch 
within his own soul which should not be put 
out by the gusts of the dark valley—a torch 
which should defy the power of the withering 
blast to extinguish and should forbid the 
damp of death to quell. 

Do you doubt that such was the aspira- 
tion of the men who recorded the trans- 
lation of Enoch. Look, then, at the earliest 
Pictures in the Gallery. What is their pro- 


72 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


minent characteristic in relation to the hope 
of immortality? It is the effort to grasp 
Eternal Life, here and now. When I survey 
these Portraits, I can almost see the hand of 
the artist at work on the elaboration of the 
idea. I see ome thought dominating the 
canvas—the perpetuation of that ideal which 
is expressed in the translation of Enoch. 
There is a perpetual attempt to resist the 
inroads of time, to keep the Portrait ever 
young. Nay, there is an inversion of the 
recognised order of life; the progress of each 
day is made a progress toward the morning. 
The men of the Pentateuch grow younger 
with the striking of the hours. Whenever 
their years are full, the inspired hand hastens 
to throw a mantle of youth around them. 
Their fullest blossom is in late autumn; their 
brightest glow is in old age; their lark’s song 
is at evening time. Abraham’s glory only 
begins where ordinary life is fading. Jacob 
becomes for the first time a poet when the 
shadows of age might well have chilled him. 
The dreams of Joseph’s youth become his 


ENOCH THE IMMORTAL 73 


certainties in the closing hour. Moses, whose 
manhood has run through a desert, beholds at 
the age of a hundred and twenty years a 
vision which the spirit of youth alone could 
see—the vision which belongs to an eye 
undimmed and a natural strength unabated. 
Now, what does all this mean? What but 
this, that the Picture of Enoch is no accident 
in the Hebrew annals. It is not something 
which occupies an eccentric position in the 
Gallery ; it is a symbol of the earliest thought 
of the race which produced it. The idea 
expressed in the translation of Enoch, so far 
from being an eccentric idea, is the pre- 
dominant thought of the Pentateuch and the 
latest sentiment of the Christian Evangel. 
The passion for Eternal Life is the first and 
the last passion of the Hebrew race. To live 
for ever, to see no corruption, to keep un- 
dimmed life’s pristine glow—that is the aspir- 
ation which feeds on the sight of Enoch, and 
that is the aspiration which permeates the 
morning and the evening of the Jewish day. 
The thought which kindles that morning and 


714 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


that evening is not the waking from the sleep 
of death; it is rather the hope that the soul 
will never sleep; it is the impulse of the spirit 
of Man to see its Promised Land before death, 
to meet God face to face in some period of the 
present world, and to have the life preserved 
by receiving a breath of the Eternal. The 
ideal of Enoch’s immortality is the spirit 
which pervades Genesis and the thought 
which inspires St. John. It illuminates the 
night of Bethel; it dispels the tears of 
Bethany. It is the Alpha and the Omega; it 
marks the beginning and the end. 

And now the question occurs, Where lay 
this early hope of immortality? Each nation’s 
hope of immortality lies in the ideal of that 
nation; where the heart is, there will the 
treasure be. The Hindu’s hope lay in the 
mind’s power of thinking, the Roman’s in the 
hand’s power of acting, the Greek’s in the 
eye’s power of seeing. What was the Jew’s? 
A nation should reveal the ground of its hope 
at the very first, from the very dawn of its 
history. /udah does. Here, on the threshold 


ENOCH THE IMMORTAL 75 


we have the germ of all her expectations 
and the secret of all her aspirings. Come and 
let us look at this early biographical notice. 
It is the summary of a life very brief, very 
uneventful, very prosaic—a life which to the 
outward eye would have revealed nothing 
but the commonplace. Whatever glory it has 
is within. Whatever claim to immortality it 
has is centred in the soul. The physical side 
presents nothing romantic, nothing brilliant, 
nothing which the world calls heroic. Thus 
briefly runs the record of its days: ‘And 
Enoch lived sixty and five years and begat 
Methuselah; and Enoch walked with God 
after he begat Methuselah three hundred years, 
and begat sons and daughters; and all the 
days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and 
five years; and Enoch walked with God, and 
he was not, for God took him.’ 

Yet, brief as it is, this record is a biography 
—the description of a rounded life. Three 
times the curtain rises and falls. We see first 
an ordinary man—a life in no way distinguished 
from his contemporaries—engrossed in family 


76 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


cares and engaged in secular pursuits. At the 
end of sixty-five years he has done nothing 
to mark him out from his fellows. Suddenly 
there comes a change—drastic, complete, re- 
volutionary. Up to the birth of his son 
Methuselah he has merely ‘lived;’ he now 
begins to ‘walk with God.’ He makes a 
mysterious transition—a transition from the 
vegetative to the vital. How it comes, we 
know not. The dramas of the Bible are all 
internal; they are acted in the secret places 
of the soul. There may or there may not 
have been an outward catastrophe. There are 
lives which are transformed from vegetation 
into vitality by no visible hand; not every 
Saul of Tarsus needs a physical light to trans- 
figure him. In any case, it is the inward act 
that the Bible photographs. Very deliberately 
is this indicated here. The narrative declares 
that when Enoch began to walk with God it 
made no change in his outward environment. 
He had lived sixty-five years as a man of the 
world occupied with the cares of a household. 
When he changes mere ‘living’ into ‘ walking 


KK 


ENOCH THE IMMORTAL "7 


with God,’ he goes over precisely the same 
ground—he is still occupied with the care of 
‘sons and daughters.’ No outward eye could 
have detected any difference. Religion is not 
a change of space; it is a change of spirit. It 
is not a new road, but a new perception. It 
finds its earliest glory in retracing the old way. 
Enoch, in his vegetating days, has gone the 
round of certain household duties, has borne 
certain burdens which as a parent he was 
bound to bear. When he begins to walk with 
God he walks on the same path where he had 
vegetated. He repeats the old duties with a 
new light in his soul. He bears the old 
burdens with a new strength in his arm. He 
meets the old faces with a new love in his 
heart. He treads again the path which he trod 
yesterday; but yesterday he walked alone, 
to-day he walks with God. 

And now, for a second time, the curtain 
falls. And, when it rises again, we have a 
third and distinctively unique scene. Enoch 
himself has disappeared ; there is no trace of 
him. But there are traces of all his contem- 


78 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


poraries. We are standing in the midst of 
avast cemetery. Around us are the graves of 
a world—that world in which Enoch lived and 
moved. Inscribed on each tombstone are the 
names of those who had stood by his side, of 
those who had preceded him, of those who had 
followed him. Adam is there—outside the 
gates of Eden. Abel is there—in the field of 
his martyrdom and of his glory. Seth is there 
—in a piece of hallowed ground. Enos is 
there—and beside his grave is the first place 
of public worship. Cainan is there—inheriting 
the only possession which his race was des- 
tined to keep.1 Methuselah is there—remind- 
ing us that, however long, life comes to an end, 
But Enoch is mof there. There is no grave for 
him. There is the place where a grave should 
have been, and there is a tablet above the 
spot; but on the tablet are inscribed the 
words, ‘He is not here; he is risen.’ 

That is the picture of the life of Enoch. 
What is its message of immortality? Why is 
this man represented as escaping death? It is 


1 “Cainan’ means ‘ possession.’ 


ENOCH THE IMMORTAL 79 


on the ground of holiness; it is because he 
‘walked with God.’ Do you think that is an 
accidental connection of ideas? It is the key- 
note to all the subsequent teaching both of the 
Old Testament and of the New—the prelude 
to all the coming music. ‘He walked with 
God, and God took him,’ are words which 
never cease to echo through every corridor of 
Bible history. They ring through the Desert; 
they resound through the Tabernacle; they 
peal through the Temple; they sing through 
the Exile; they breathe through the songs of 
the Restoration; they vibrate through the 
Sermon on the Mount. From Enoch to 
Moses, from Moses to David, from David to 
the Son of David, there is one prevailing note 
of revelation, and its message is this: The 
connection between morality and immortality. 

If the Jew doubted a future life, it was be- 
cause he doubted human goodness, It was not 
the sight of a dead body that made him a 
sceptic; it was the sight of a dead soul. ‘The 
soul that sinneth, z¢ shall die,’ was the thought 
at the very root of his being. That a man 


80 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


without holiness should see the Lord was to 
him an impossibility. To abide in God’s 
Tabernacle, there was required a man with 
clean hands and a pure heart, free from life’s 
vanity and uncorrupted by earth’s treachery. 
The problem of the Jew was, ‘Who shall dwell 
in everlasting burning!’ and by that he meant, 
not ‘Who shall dwell in the flames of hell!’ 
but ‘ Who shall! dwell in the flames of heaven!’ 
—‘ Who shall abide with the burning purity 
of God!’ That was with him the one question, 
the crucial question. Physical difficulties were 
nowhere; intellectual difficulties were nowhere ; 
his one dread of death was his sense of the soul’s 
unpreparedness for meeting the holiness of God. 

That great spectator of the Gallery—the 
writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews—has an 
observation regarding the Portrait of Enoch 
which to my mind singularly illustrates the 
point we are considering. He says, ‘ By faith 
Enoch was translated that he should not see 
death, for before his translation he had this 
testimony—that he pleased God.’ For a long 


time these words conveyed to me an impres- 


ENOCH THE IMMORTAL 81 


sion of artistic incongruity. The thing which 
zsthetically jarred on me was the latter clause. 
It seemed an anti-climax. To say that Enoch 
was translated to an upper world was a tre- 
mendous statement—a statement which lifted 
the mind at once to the very top of the hill. 
But to add that previous to this mighty event 
he had the testimony of having pleased God— 
was not this a coming down from the hill! 
Was it not like saying, ‘The man got a sight 
of the sun; but before he got a sight of the sun 
he had a glimpse of the candle’! Surely the 
getting to heaven was the climax of all blessed- 
ness, and rendered superfluous any statement 
of previous and minor revelations to his soul ! 
So I reasoned; and I reasoned wrongly. For 
the art was really on the side of the writer to 
the Hebrews. What I called an anti-climax 
was in truth a culmination, a completion of 
the whole story, a statement without which it 
would be mot complete. Let us consider why. 

No Jew would have accepted the belief that 
translation to heaven would zz¢se/f be a boon. 
Paul says that if the last day of the world 

F 


82 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


were come and those who remained alive were 
to be caught up without dying, they would 
have as much need to be changed as those who 
pass through the valley of the shadow. And 
is he not right! Is he not right apart from re- 
ligion altogether—as a mere matter of common 
sense! If you were told that, by the influence 
of lightning or some other known or unknown 
physical agency, one of your friends had 
been suddenly carried up to the planet Jupiter, 
would you not feel on his account considerable 
discomfort? Assuredly; and for this reason, 
that you had no evidence of your friend having 
received a previous revelation from that planet. 
Everything would depend on that previous 
revelation, on that foregoing ‘testimony.’ It 
would not help your peace to know that 
Jupiter is a grander planet than the Earth, nor 
even to be told that its inhabitants enjoy a hap- 
piness to which the Earth is a stranger. The 
question for you would be, Was the happiness 
of Jupiter in congruity with the mznd of the 
Earth? Had there come to your friend, un- 


known to you and in the silence of the night, 


ENOCH THE IMMORTAL 83 


intimation of the nature of that world to which 
he was going, indications of a kindred sym- 
pathy, messages that he would not find himself 
an alien, revealings that there was a place in 
that planet prepared for him? Nothing but 
this would satisfy the solicitude of your soul. 
Now, before you criticise the writer to the 
Hebrews, remember that the same thought 
was in Azs mind. He had before him the 
picture of a man taken up bodily into heaven. 
He did not feel that this was by itself a boon. 
He wanted to know something more. Was 
the man fit for his new environment? Was 
there a congruity between him and his fresh 
surroundings? Would he find when trans- 
planted a soil where he could grow? Could 
flesh and blood see the kingdom of God; 
could corruption inherit incorruption! Did not 
translation suggest such a query even more 
than death did! Death was at least a weed- 
ing out of much that corrupts—of the old 
body and the lusts thereof. But to be lifted 
into heaven with the old body, to be taken 
up with the faded garment still hanging 


84 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


round him, to be ushered into the presence of 
God without losing those elements which had 
attracted to the earth—this was something 
which wakened the inquiry, ‘Who is sufficient 
for these things!’ 

Do you not see now how the statement of 
Enoch’s preliminary message comes as a 
climax. It supplies the one thing needed to 
suggest exaltation. It says that Enoch was 
not transplanted into /forezgn soil. It says 
that translation was preceded by revelation— 
that before going out into the new world he 
had a picture of that world in his mind. It 
tells us that the beginning of the process was 
not the approach of earth to heaven; it was 
the approach of heaven to earth. He did not 
first go to Eshcol to try the taste of the grapes; 
he had specimens of the fruit drought to him— 
sent into his desert as a foretaste. And this 
foretaste was the climax of the glory ; it made 
the glory, when it came, not wholly new. The 
wholly new cannot be the wholly beautiful. 
Before I am translated into any scene I must 
have a testimony concerning that scene. The 


ENOCH THE IMMORTAL 85 


fields of God may be absolutely lovely ; but I 
want them to be relatively lovely—lovely to 
me. To be that, they must speak to my past, 
to my yesterday, to my remembrance. In so 
far as their beauty transcends me, they will 
be to me wot beautiful. If they would speak 
to my heart, they must remind me of some- 
thing. 

And I think this keynote of the Jewish 
message explains a fact which has puzzled 
all the historians of the land of Israel—her 
extreme reticence as to the future life. No 
man can say that this reticence was the result 
of ignorance. Her youth had been spent in 
the very soil where the thought of immortality 
grew luxuriant. Egypt was of all lands that 
which dreamed most of the life beyond; its 
whole interest was in a world to come. It 
was for this it raised its piles of architecture ; 
it was for this it inaugurated its rites of 
worship; its very manual of religious devotion 
was entitled ‘The Book of the Dead.’ From 
this land of the Eternal Shadows, Judah came; 
we should have expected her to have shared 


86 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


in these shadows. We should have thought 
that the religion of Israel would have been a 
constant call to prepare for a world to come. 
On the contrary, such a note is conspicuous 
by its absence. On every experience of earth 
the changes are rung; but there is a silence 
over Man’s futurity. The Jewish Psalmody 
is the richest of all music; but it lacks a 
chord which vibrates in lower harmonies—the 
message of a world beyond. Why? Do you 
think it can be accident? No; it must bea 
designed silence—silence for a reason. And 
what better reason can there be than the 
thought whose keynote was struck in the 
translation of Enoch! The Jew is reticent 
about the future because with him the solemnity 
lies in the present. His first meeting with 
God is not to be on the farther shore; it is 
demanded here and now. Eternal Life is 
with him not something which follows death; 
it is something which precedes death. His 
God is not beyond the grave, and therefore 
his immortality is not beyond the grave. Im- 
mortality without God would be his despair. 


ENOCH THE IMMORTAL 87 


If he is to go into another world and not be 
a stranger, he must carry something over from 
this world ; and he can carry nothing but God. 
Therefore his one solemnity is the meeting 
with God now—under the oak of Mamre or 
on the hilltop of Moriah. ‘Prepare to meet 
thy God, O Israel!’ are very solemn words 
of the Old Covenant; but the contemplated 
meeting was not in a scene beyond the tomb, 
but on the earthly side of the Valley of Death. 


TOO need first the vision of Thyself, O 

Lord! I would not taste of death until 
I have seen 7hee! Even were I told that death 
was but translation, I would not taste it till I 
had seen Zhee! No chariot of fire can bear 
me to glory unless the glory be already in my 
heart! In vain Thy crystal river shall sparkle 
if I have no eye for beauty! In vain Thy 
choristers shall sing if I have no ear for music! 
In vain Thy day shall be nightless if I have 
no thirst for knowledge! In vain Thy sea 
shall be stormless if I have no wish for expan- 


88 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


sion! In vain Thy work shall be painless if I 
have no mission for my hands! In vain Thy 
city shall be gateless if there be no love im- 
prisoned in my soul! Not to seek Thee in 
heaven would I come; come and seek me on 
earth! I would be translated defore death; I 
would taste Thy grapes in my desert. Thy 
Life is zo¢ beyond the grave; it is here, it is 
now. I can reach it without dying; I can 
breathe it without expiring. I need not the 
wings of a dove to find it; I require not an 
angel’s flight to lead me to its rest. I have 
heard men say, ‘Death is the gate of Life.’ 
Nay; Zhou art the gate, and Death is the 
shady avenue. Not on the other side would 
I see Thy face unveiled; meet me on ¢hzs 
bank of the crystal river! Meet me in the 
mist and in the rain! Come to me in my 
cloud! Speak to me in my struggles! Wait 
for me at the opening of the valley! Trans- 
late me into Thy presence ere I tread the 
narrow way! Send me the morning before 


the evening! Show me heaven ere I die! 


CHAPTER V 
NOAH THE RENEWER 


As we pass to the next figure of the group 
there is, as it seems to me, a point of develop- 
ment well worthy of attention. In the two 
preceding figures we have seen the human 
soul struggling with the defects of its environ- 
ment. In neither of these cases has the soul 
really conquered; it has only escaped and 
flown away. Abel has a higher ideal of 
sacrifice than Cain; but Cain is stronger than 
Abel. All that can be done with Abel is to 
transplant him, to remove him from the evils 
that are coming on the earth. Enoch is walk- 
ing on a higher plane than his contemporaries— 
walking with God. But one man cannot stem 
the torrent of a nation’s iniquity; all that can 
be done for Enoch is to translate him, to carry 


him into a purer air where he will have 
89 


go THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


freedom to pursue his walk unmolested. But 
with the figure of Noah we are brought face 
to face with a new conception. The old con- 
ditzons are there, the old struggle is there; but 
the result is different. Hitherto, the problem 
has been solved by the translation of the man ; 
it is now to be solved by the translation of the 
world. Hitherto, the only sequel has been 
the removal of the man from his environment ; 
there is now introduced a new solution—the 
renewal of the environment to suit the man. 
For the first time in the Great Gallery, we are 
confronted with the idea of reform. Noah is 
not the first to protest, but he is the first 
to reform. Enoch’s walk was a protest, but it 
did nothing for the world; it only saved him- 
self. But with Noah there begins the first of a 
series of efforts to save the wor/d—to translate, 
not the man, but the earth. That the seed of 
the woman should be carried into the wilderness 
where the dragon cannot hurt it, is doubtless 
a consoling thing; but it would be something 
more consoling still if the seed of the woman 
should bruise the 4ead of the dragon! 


NOAH THE RENEWER 91 


I have said that Noah represents the begin- 
ning of such efforts. It is well to emphasise 
the point. The popular notion is that he 
represents xothing—that he died with the ante- 
diluvians. We think of him as having been 
the hero of a unique and unparalleled cata- 
strophe, and as therefore outside of our daily 
experience. No man has suffered so much 
from the flood as Noah. It has drowned his 
reputation. It has quenched his fame as a 
representative man. The flood has infected 
his memory with the mist of its own antiquity. 
The more universal we make the deluge, the 
more local we make Noah—the more do we 
isolate him from the common experience of 
mankind. We come to think of him as a man 
in a miraculous environment—a man whose 
life-tragedy lay in circumstances that have 
never occurred since, and will never occur 
again ; and we feel that, whatever may have 
been his interest to his generation, his influence 
has perished for posterity. 

Now, the truth is that, in so reasoning, we 


have entirely mistaken the real point of signi- 


92 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


ficance in Noah’s experience. The tragedy of 
this man’s life is not the flood at all. From 
any historical point of view, from any artistic 
point of view, the least interesting feature 
about him is precisely his sojourn in the ark. 
His interest for posterity lies in the duzlding 
of the ark, not in the sailing of it. It lies in 
the fact that he was the first who made an 
effort at reform. He was not the first of 
dissatisfied men. Enoch was dissatisfied. But 
Enoch was content to make his escape from 
the earth and leave things as they were. 
Noah was not thus content. He saw things 
in as bad a light as Enoch did; he deplored 
them as muchas Enoch deplored them. But 
Enoch’s goal was not enough for 47m. Ata 
certain stage of despair, to drop the curtain 
and be done with the world is a very easy 
thing; but at no stage is it the highest thing. 
The highest thing is to refuse to accept the 
position of the world as final, to insist on 
remaining within it until its sin is washed 
away. That is the attitude of Noah. He is 
the sad spectator of a scene of moral corrup. 


NOAH THE RENEWER 93 


tion. His heart is heavy with the burden of 
a degenerate race. Yet he refuses to abandon 
the rédle of a declaimer. He clings to the 
hope that when the ship is shattered by the 
storm, there may be left entire a single plank 
which shall come forth purified by the waters, 
and become the nucleus of a new vessel 
destined for wider and nobler service. 

What, then, was this vision of corruption 
which Noah saw?—that is the first question 
which lies before us. It is very graphically and 
very characteristically answered by the sacred 
narrative, ‘ All the imaginations of the thoughts 
of man’s heart were only evil every day.’ This 
is not the description we should have expected. 
It is characteristic of the Bible, but it is not 
characteristic of human nature. We should 
have thought that an ancient narrative wishing 
to expose the wickedness of a short-lived race 
would have begun by making a catalogue of 
its actual crimes. So would any other ancient 
narrative in the world. But the Bible is on 
the very threshold true to its future self. It 
strikes here a chord from which it never 


94 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


deviates—the chord of inwardness. With sur- 
prising modernness, it refuses to indicate cor- 
ruption by a catalogue of deeds done. It goes 
to the root of the matter—to the deeds xot 
done, the deeds in the imagination. That is 
the refrain of the Bible from Genesis to 
Revelation. Paul cries to the Philippians, 
‘Whatsoever things are pure and lovely and 
of good report, think of these things!’ We 
expect him to say, ‘Do these things!’ But 
he has simply reproduced the message which 
was given to primitive humanity, ‘ Beware of 
your zdeal!’ There is not a more profound 
sentiment in all ethical literature. The radical 
difference between a good man and a bad man 
lies in what they ¢hznk. The boundary line 
between virtue and vice is situated in the 
imagination. The germ-cell of a man’s 
character is his ideal, his answer to the ques- 
tion, ‘What makes life worth living?’ So 
said this early artist. He looks at the stream- 
ing crowd and cries, not ‘What are they 
doing!’ but ‘What are they thinking of!’— 
‘What are they dreaming of!’—‘What are 


NOAH THE RENEWER 95 


they enamoured of!’ He does not ask what 
their hand is touching, but what their eye is 
seeing. He draws his colours from within. 
Perhaps the man amongst them who has 
least violated the law appears to him the most 
hopeless subject; for the measure of each is 
determined, not by the height of his deeds, 
but by the height of his imaginings. 

The danger, then, of this age was the danger 
which besets the young men of every age—an 
unworthy ideal of glory. What was, in the 
view of this artist, this unworthy ideal of 
glory? It was the admiration for the Portrait 
of Cain, the preferring of the physical to the 
mental. No one can read the early chapters 
of Genesis without being impressed with the 
fact that the memory of Cain has become the 
world’s ideal. The recurrence of his name in 
the names of his successors would alone bear 
evidence of this. When we hear one called 
Cainan, another designated Tubal-Cain, what 
does that imply? Clearly this, that he was 
the hero of the people, the man after whose 
likeness parents moulded their children. But 


96 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


there is higher evidence than that. The 
memory of Cain had found its way, not only 
into the names of his successors, but into the 
literature of the succeeding age. There arose 
in that age a great poet, a poet the rhythm of 
whose words has not been drowned by the 
noise of the deluge. A fragment of his verse 
has come over the flood, and is known to us 
as ‘The Song of the Sword.’ It is sung to 
his two wives, perhaps in accompaniment to 
one of those musical instruments which had 
their origin in his family. The striking 
feature of this fragment is its inspiration by 
the memory of Cain. Brief as it is, Cain 
figures there—figures in his violence, takes a 
heroic place in his very deed of shame. He 
appears as the successful homicide—the homi- 
cide who secures immunity by his very crime, 
and is protected by that which should have 
assailed him. The poet has evidently caught 
fire from a current enthusiasm—the admira- 
tion for brute force successfully exerted and 
followed by no catastrophe on the person of 
the delinquent. 


NOAH THE RENEWER 97 


Now, when a man’s example finds its way 
into literature, that man has conquered his 
age; he has won an empire compared to which 
the power of the monarch grows pale. And if 
it be a dad example, words cannot describe the 
detriment which an age suffers. When the 
poets of a nation chant songs of the sword, 
when they sing in rolling numbers the glories 
of oppression, when they ring the triumphs of 
might victorious over right and of tyranny 
trampling upon truth—it is then that there 
comes to life, and especially to the life of youth, 
the greatest danger that can meet a human 





soul—the danger of mistaking evil for good. 
Now, this was the danger of that old world. 
It had caught the fever of a false enthusiasm. 
Its disease was a disease of the imagination— 
an admiration for the thing least admirable. 
The danger of the Jew has always been an 
image, graven or ungraven. It has come, not 
from the object, but from the reflection of the 
object in his eye. So was it here. ‘There 
were giants on the earth in those days,’ cries 
the narrator. There was no harm in that, 
G 


98 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


assuredly! But then, he naively adds that 
these giants ‘were of old the men of renown,’ 
There the harm began! This race, as I 
understand it, had fixed upon the physical 
development as the one end in life. They had 
enthroned in their imagination the men of 
bodily might, the men of muscle, the men of 
bone and sinew. They had recognised as the 
crown of human glory the qualities that could 
crush, the qualities that could break and bend. 
They had begun to experience that sentiment 
which they were to bequeath to their de- 
scendants—the offence of the cross. They 
had come to look upon meekness, mercy, 
compassion, as unmanly things. Their ad- 
miration for crushing strength was beginning 
to act on the body-politic. It was becoming 
the woman’s motive for choosing a husband— 
the ground of her sexual selection. Not 
obscurely is this hinted in the sixth chapter of 
Genesis. As I read its record, I feel myself 
in the presence of a shrewd utilitarianism 
proposing to regulate the marriage-tie on 
purely prudential principles. 


NOAH THE RENEWER 99 


Unfortunately, the course proposed was not 
really prudential. The motive of this people 
was that which afterward found expression in 
the Tower of Babel—to secure permanence 
for their race. It had never occurred to them 
that permanence cannot be secured on a 
merely physical basis, that to build on such a 
basis was to build upon the sand. The 
suggestion of danger came from a voice 
outside—the /ast voice which was likely to 
influence the zzside. There appeared a man 
who would now be called a street-preacher, 
The second epistle which bears the name of 
St. Peter calls him ‘a preacher of righteous- 
ness. The expression is significant. It in- 
dicates that the mission of Noah was not that 
of a soothsayer, of a man who cried, ‘ There is 
a flood coming on the earth; come into my 
ark and you will be saved!’ No, to read it 
thus is to read it wrongly. No one can study 
the Picture without coming to the conclusion 
that the original aim of Noah was to avert the 
flood. He was not a prophet in any other 
sense than Jonah was a prophet. He was not 


100 60@. THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


magically to foretell the inevitable occurrence 
of an event. Rather was he to proclaim that its 
occurrence was vot inevitable—that it might or 
might not happen, according to the righteous- 
ness of the community. Let me try to exhibit 
this point; it has been habitually lost sight 
of, and by losing sight of it we have reduced 
the personality of Noah from the height of a 
teacher to the stature of a magician. 

Out from the giants of the antediluvian 
world, there strides this silent, unobtrusive 
figure. Silent and unobtrusive he has hitherto 
been. His name suggests this; ‘Noah’ means 
‘rest. Amid the bustle of his age he has been 
marked out, perhaps stigmatised, as ‘the quiet 
man.’ Nobody looked for a reaction through 
him. On the contrary, his contemporaries ex- 
pected that he would loyally follow in the 
worldly path of his forefathers. ‘He shall 
comfort us concerning the work of our hands, 
because of the ground which the Lord hath 
cursed.’ Such was the hope which centred round 
his life. I understand the words to mean, ‘ His 


piety shall profit us, his prayers shall bring good 





| 
2 


NOAH THE RENEWER 101 


harvests.’ Yet this is the man who becomes a 
thorn in the side of that old world! There he 
stands—a solitary figure over against a multi- 
tude! He plants himself suddenly in the 
highway and raises into shrill accents that 
voice which hitherto had been silent. The 
note of his preaching is Reform. He calls to 
his countrymen: ‘You are in a delusion. You 
think you are building on the solid earth. I 
tell you that you are separated by a thin crust 
from a flood of waters. You and I are in the 
path of an overwhelming tide, and I do not 
mean to stay there; I must have something to 
breast the coming waves. Will you not avert 
their coming! Will you not realise before it is 
too late that if you crush out mind by matter 
you have broken the only embankment that re- 
strains the sea! Will you let in a rush of waters 
that will drown society, engulf order, submerge 
law, swamp the paths of peace, overwhelm the 
meek and gentle, bury fathoms deep the 
aspirations of the heart!’ 

Such I believe to have been the original 
message of this earliest of preachers—before 


102 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


even to his own mind, it took concrete form. 
Even when it did take concrete form, the 
message of Noah was a moral message. The 
ark of safety which he proposed to build for 
the world was at no time the ark of gopher- 
wood. The ark of gopher-wood: was never 
meant for the safety of the world, but, as the 
writer to the Hebrews says, ‘for the saving of 
his own house’; it was only to be used when 
the world vefused to be saved. The edifice he 
proposed to build for his countrymen was not 
a ship to save men from the flood; it was a 
structure to prevent the flood from coming. 
He was no clairvoyant looking into the future 
and beholding an inevitable catastrophe in 
to-morrow’s sky. The danger he saw was not 
in the future; it was in the present. The 
district was unclean—unclean in its streets, 
unclean in its houses. He saw that such 
corruption would involve a plague, and he 
prepared a hospital in case of that plague. 
Yet he felt that the real cure was not the 
devising of the hospital, but the cleansing of 
the causeway—not the minimising of the pesti- 


NOAH THE RENEWER 103 


lence when it came, but the prevention of the 
pestilence from coming. To read Noah other- 
wise is to misread him—to misread on the 
threshold the nature of Bible prophecies, The 
prophecies of the Bible are never announce- 
ments of what shall be; they are announce- 
ments of what must be if things remain as 
they are. I will not admit a single exception 
to this. When the prophet cries,‘God will 
judge Assyria!’—‘ Egypt shall not escape !’— 
‘Nineveh shall be overthrown!’ what does he 
mean? That if Assyria and Egypt and 
Nineveh fail to cleanse their streets, they will 
get the plague. It is not meant that the 
plague will come irrespective of the cleansing. 
Do you doubt this? Take one crowning 
instance as the proof of all. The fall of 
Jerusalem was predicted in detail; yet at her 
eleventh hour a greater than all her prophets 
said that He would have gathered her children 
under His wings if, even in this her day of 
tribulation, she had known the things that 
belonged to her peace. 

Accordingly, the tragedy of every Jewish 


104 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


reformer lies in his hours of waiting—waiting 
for the spiritual dawn. This is Noah’s tragedy 
—the tragedy of the mother watching the 
symptoms of the sick child. His eye is not 
on the coming flood; it is on the ebb and flow 
of Man’s fitful fever. His eagerness is not 
that his prediction should be fulfilled; it is 
that it should ot be fulfilled. His desire is 
that the limb may not need to be amputated ; 
he waits for signs of amendment. It is for 
this he has to labour so long—not for the 
completion of the wooden ark. The Divine 
power which could bring a flood of retribu- 
tion might well have brought the ark on its 
bosom. But this preacher had to wait for 
something which Divine power could ot 
bring, without destroying Man more effec- 
tively than by the deluge. He had to wait 
for something which must be voluntary—a 
change in the human soul, the dawning of a 
new day in the heart of the creature. Such 
a dawn must be free—not forced; it may be 
prayed for, but it must be waited for. The 
tragedy of Noah’s life is that solitary vigil. 


NOAH THE RENEWER 105 


He is to my mind the most solitary figure 
ever painted on the canvas of history—except, 
perhaps, One. Noah’s solitude is solitude in 
a crowd—and it is all the deeper on that 
account. We see an eager man in the heart 
of an eager multitude; but the eagerness of 
the man is not on the same ground as the 
eagerness of the multitude. The man is bent 
on the things of the spirit; the multitude is 
intent on the life of the flesh. There can be 
no solitude more intense than an experience 
like this. The desert is not so lonely, the 
pathway of the forest is not sodrear. To be 
the spectator of an unsympathetic crowd is 
the climax of lonesomeness, 

If I were asked to photograph the life of Noah 
in one expression, I would say that its charac- 
teristic is solitary waiting. From beginning 
to end this is its leading feature. As with the 
life of Enoch, there are three risings and fallings 
of the curtain. We first see the man in the 
midst of the world, lifting a solitary protest 
against the life of that world. It is the lonely 
vigil of a single human soul through the 


106 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


watches of a night lit up by the lamps of 
revelry and heated by the fires of licence; it 
is Faith watching and waiting for the dawn. 
Then the scene changes. The man is lifted 
above the world—almost translated like Enoch. 
He is floated in the air on a lonely sea—a 
sea whose waters have covered every rood of 
land and have buried in their depths that giant 
strength of which earth was so proud. But 
even in this vast solitude this human soul is 
waiting—waiting for an earth renewed, waiting 
for the green leaf to reappear, waiting for the 
emergence of the mountain’s brow. He is 
sending forth the raven and the dove as his 
messengers to bring him tidings of the re- 
appearing land. Then comes the third vision, 
and it is different from both. The night is 
gone and the waters are gone. The world has 
risen baptized from its corruption, but with 
the weariness of a weaned child. The old life 
is past, but the new is not yet come. And 
there stands Noah—solitary, waiting still! 
For the first time in his vigil he waits under 
a rainbow. The new life has not come, but 


NOAH THE RENEWER 107 


hope has dawned. Light is in the east; morn- 
ing is in the air; the breath of spring is 
pulsating in the ground. Everywhere there is 
the joy of a deginning. Everywhere there is 
the sense of a fresh start in life. Everywhere 
there is the proclamation of a second chance 
for Man—a chance of emancipation from the 
old heredity, of liberation from the yoke of 
yesterday, of freedom from the ancestral 
stain. When the last curtain falls it leaves 
Noah waiting; but he is waiting under the 
rainbow. 


THANK Thee, O Lord, that even where 

corruption has risen into a flood, it has 
never conquered the world! I thank Thee 
that one stream of holiness has ever been more 
powerful than an ocean of iniquity! I thank 
Thee for that promise made by the rainbow 
that, however hereditary be the course of sin, 
it shall never overflood the earth! Often do 
I marvel at the fulfilment of this promise. I 
have heard the floods lifting up their voice 


108 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


with a great noise; I have seen the waves 
of unrighteousness cover the land. I said in 
my heart, ‘God is conquered ; evil has pre- 
vailed; faith has been a delusion!’ But as I 
watched and waited, the deluge became the 
delusion; the waves sank, the winds lulled, 
the waters dried up, and Ararat raised her 
head to greet the sun! Why is it that, when 
the waters of sin are so deep and the streams 
of purity so shallow, the streams have always 
proved mightier than the waters? It is be- 
cause holiness is more hereditary than uzholi- 
ness. Thou hast no rainbow of promise for 
the propagation of evil; it has only the 
promise of the fourth generation; it gets 
weaker as it goes. But love, Zhy love, has 
the rainbow! Though it were only one spark 
in a rayless night, though it were only one 
seed in a barren soil, though it were only one 
throb in a lifeless pulse—it has the rainbow! 
There is no 4mzt to its power of descending! 
When I tread it in the dust, it blossoms; when 
I crucify it, it is crowned; when I bury it, 
it rises from the dead; when I degrade it, it 


io, Se we SESS oo ie 


NOAH THE RENEWER 109 


sits upon a throne; when I depress it, it is 
exalted; when I clothe it in rags, it assumes 
white raiment; when I bring it to Calvary, it 
hails the Easter Morning! I thank Thee, O 
Father, that no cross can kill Thy Christ; I 
bless Thee that Thy rainbow-promise is to the 
flower—not to the flood! 


CHAPTER VI 
ABRAHAM THE COSMOPOLITAN 


THERE is, as it seems to me, a strong analogy 
between the figures of Enoch, Noah, and 
Abraham. They are all, in a sense, translated 
men—men who have been lifted above their 
immediate surroundings and led to anticipate 
other surroundings. Enoch has dreamed of 
heaven; Noah has dreamed of a land beyond 
the sea; Abraham is to dream of a land 
beyond the years. To this last has been 
accorded a great distinction. The most 
mature of all the Gospels declares that he 
anticipated the Christian Era—‘ Your father 
Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw 
it, and was glad.’ In what sense is it meant 
that Abraham foresaw the day of Christ? 
Not in the sense of a clairvoyant; that would 


have been no real revelation of Christ. The 
110 


ABRAHAM THE COSMOPOLITAN rrr 


only way in which I can foresee the day of 
another is by living the life of that day. 
There are days in the heart of winter which 
may be said to anticipate the summer—days of 
sunshine, days of warmth, days of calm. So 
is it in the winter of the moral world. There 
are hours in which humanity seems to makea 
leap into other centuries and other scenes. 
There are men who are before their time. 
They stand upon a hill and see the other side. 
They narrowly miss being heralds of the 
future. They only miss that destiny because 
their age is not ripe for them. Like Paul, 
they are ‘born out of due time’—born too 
soon. They have an Easter vision while it is 
yet winter, and therefore the winter loves 
them not. They are not looked upon as pre- 
mature, but as immature—as unripe fruits of 
the tree of life, whose branches ought to be 
cut down to prevent disease and death. They 
are in advance of their age, and therefore they 
are the victims of their age. They are ever 
the men of sacrifice. 

Such a man is Abraham. He is born too 


112 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


soon. The father of a vast multitude, he is 
himself a lonely figure—above his surround- 
ings, unappreciated by his age. And why is 
this? It is because he has conceived an idea to 
which his age is a stranger—an idea the working 
out of which z¢se/f involves sacrifice. We are 
in a great mistake about the life of Abraham. 
We think of it as a brilliant morning followed 
by a splendid noonday and a stormy night— 
aS an existence whose dawn and _ whose 
meridian were marked by personal triumph, 
but whose evening had to bear the cross. A 
more untrue description of the artist’s thought 
cannot be conceived. This life is all cross 
together—morning, noon, and night. It is 
from beginning to end a life of sacrifice, 
Mount Moriah is not what we imagine—an un- 
fortunate accident which disturbed his sun- 
shine at the last. No; it is only the dark 
close of a dark day, the latest step of that 
long ascent which had begun in Ur of the 
Chaldees with the climbing of a steep hill. 

Let us consider this beginning. A youth 
in the land of Ur conceives the desire to 








ABRAHAM THE COSMOPOLITAN 113 


emigrate. It comes to him in the form of a 
Divine command—in the sense of a destiny, 
‘Get thee out of thy country, and from thy 
kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a 
land that I will show thee; and I will make 
of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, 
and make thy name great; and thou shalt be 
a blessing ; and in thee shall all families of the 
earth be blessed.’ Now, the popular view is that 
this is the record of a young man’s amodztion. 
We figure Abraham as a youth tired of his mean 
surroundings, eager to get out from the narrow 
precincts of a paltry village into the life and 
air of the metropolis—a man wishing to make 
his fortune and seeking for a wider field of 
labour. We figure him so, and so figuring 
him, we make light of his velzgzon. We say, 
‘Who would not obey a Divine command like 
that—a command to better one’s self, a com- 
mand to be prosperous, a command to have 
purple and fine linen and sumptuous faring 
every day; would not any man be pious on 
these terms!’ 

_ But we have entirely misinterpreted the 

H 


114 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


meaning of the artist. The Picture he seeks 
to draw is exactly the opposite of that which 
our mind has sketched. It is not that of a 
young man striving to be rich; it is that of a 
youth who in the enthusiasm of a great cause 
is willing to be poor. It is not the delineation 
of a life which is impressed with the narrow- 
ness of its surroundings and longs for wider 
room; it is the unselfishness of a life which 
feels the largeness of its room and pities the 
narrow surroundings of others. Abraham is 
not the man of a village seeking a metropolis; 
he is the man of a metropolis seeking to 
extend a village. Ur of the Chaldees was no 
home in the desert ; it was a centre of civilisa- 
tion, a seat of worldly prosperity. The dream 
which there burst upon the soul of Abraham 
was the hope of being a secular missionary, a 
colonist of waste places. He looked out from 
a scene of culture upon a scene of surrounding 
barbarism, or, at least, of surrounding primi- 
tiveness. There came to him the thought that 
his culture was a gift from God—a gift not to 
retain, but to bestow. Was it not the part of 


ABRAHAM THE COSMOPOLITAN 115 


a benefited nation to bless those lands which 
had not been benefited! If he had a lamp of 
blessing, it was surely given that he might 
share it! Had he any right to sit contentedly 
beside his fire while others were cold! Should 
he not go out into the cold and teach others 
how to make a fire! Would not his own 
comfort durn him if he monopolised it! Was 
it not his duty to leave his country and his 
kindred and his father’s house—that he might 
plant the blessings of civilisation in countries 
and kindreds and houses which were still 
untouched by its light! 

The truth is, I regard the Portrait of Abra- 
ham as the earliest attempt to represent a 
cosmopolitan man—a man seeking to make 
the world a recipient of his own blessing. 
You will go wrong, in my opinion, if you 
find his antitype in the youth who seeks to 
agerandise himself. You will find it rather 
in him who is eager to spend himself—to pour 
out all the treasures of his life for the good of 
humanity. He is the forerunner of that great 
missionary band which, whether in the sphere 


116 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


of religion or of culture have been the pioneers 
of a new era to lands that were outside the pale 
—the forerunner of Duff, of Livingstone, of 
Moffat, of Carey, of Stanley, of Nansen, of Sir 
John Franklin—of all in every age who have 
travelled and explored for purposes of human 
development. Abraham is the man with the 
cosmopolitan spirit—the man who realises the 
common rights of the human race and seeks 
to secure them for the race. This will always be 
his proudest distinction and his highest glory. 

And it will also be found to have been 
the root of his sacrificial life. No man in the 
days of Abraham could be a cosmopolitan 
without incurring the command, ‘Get thee out 
of thy country, and from thy kindred, and 
from thy father’s house!’ To be a cosmo- 
politan is now a noble thing; it was then a 
suspected thing. Man had not learned the 
rights of human nature. He had not learned 
that the fact of being a sufferer itself confers 
the right to be succoured, shielded, comforted. 
The morality of each nation was national. To 
be touched with sins and sorrows outside was 





ei. 


i 
' 
e 
‘ 


ABRAHAM THE COSMOPOLITAN 117 


unpatriotic. Patriotism was the highest virtue; 
the love of country was the highest love. 
When a man’s inner nature said to him, ‘Get 
thee out of thy country!’ and when for the 
benefit of otker countries he felt constrained 
to obey that voice, he was likely to go alone. 
By his act of cosmopolitan sympathy he had 
divorced himself from zatzonal sympathy. If 
the brook insists on widening into an ocean, 
it will thereby cease to be a brook. No doubt 
it will make a grand exchange; but an eye 
untrained to the vast will prefer the narrower 
precincts and look with regret on the enlarge- 
ment of the waters. Even so was Abraham 
regarded. The cosmopolitan impulse that 
came upon him was an enlargement of spirit ; 
it transformed a brook into a sea. But, for 
that very reason, it was a curtailment of his 
sphere among contemporaries. It exposed 
him to social ostracism. It separated him 
from his age. It expelled him from current 
sympathies. It caused him to be looked upon 
as a visionary, as a dreamer, as a man unfit 
for his kind. The path selected by Abraham 


118 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


was a path which the world of his day did 
not deem heroic. - 

Look now at this phase of Abraham’s life 
in the light of the later saying that he saw 
the day of the Lord. Is not the initial 
movement of this man’s life precisely the 
initial movement ascribed to the Messianic 
course of Jesus! Paul declares that the first 
thing Jesus did was to ‘empty Himself’—to 
select a path of impoverishment and privation. 
‘He who was rich, for our sakes became poor,’ 
are the suggestive words in which he emphasises 
the sacrifice involved in the cosmopolitan path 
of the Son of Man. From beginning to end 
the charge against Him was the fact that His 
mission was. more than national; that He 
deemed the welfare of humanity an object of 
higher interest than the welfare of His country. 
Could any period of past history mirror that 
fact in anticipation more clearly than the ex- 
perience of Abraham! If you read it as we 
have read it, as I believe the artist meant it 
to be read, you will see in it a forecast shadow 
of the Gospel delineation. Here is a man who 


: 
: 


ABRAHAM THE COSMOPOLITAN 119 


might have been rich taking a course which 
involved his becoming poor. No doubt he is 
promised large possessions; but these are only 
promised—they had to be accepted by faith. 
What had to be accepted as fact was present 
privation—hardship, weariness, distrust by old 
friends, coldness from strangers, isolation from 
the life of all. All this was involved in the 
cosmopolitan path of Abraham. It was a 
lonely path, a thorny path, a hitherto untrodden 
path—a path which was only to be trodden in 
its fulness when the feet of the Son of Man 
should overstep the boundaries of nations. 

The life of Abraham, then, begins with an 
experience which, in germ, is identical with 
that ot Jesus. Onthe threshold of his ministry 
I am struck, too, by the analogy between the 
first three trials of Abraham and the three 
temptations of Jesus. Taking the order of 
these temptations from the narrative of St. 
Matthew, they correspond to the order of the 
trials of Abraham. Of course, it is an unde- 
signed coincidence; it is neither prophecy on 
the part of Genesis nor reproduction on the 


120 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


part of the Gospel, but it is all the more striking 
on that account. - Look at the experience 
attributed to Jesus. The tempter comes to 
Him and says, ‘Command that these stones 
be made bread’; it is an appeal to the physical 
nature—the sense of outward want. The 
scene changes, and there is a new appeal— 
what I might call an appeal to the imagina- 
tion. Christ stands on a pinnacle of the 
temple, and a voice cries, ‘Cast thyself down— 
try to reach your goal by the road of physical 
power. Then comes the final trial—the moral 
conflict of the soul. Before the eye of Jesus 
chere stretch two fields of possible possession— 
the one rich and luxuriant, the other at present 
a bleak and desert waste, and between these 
two He is called to choose. The tempter 
emphasises the glory of the luxuriant field, 
‘All these things will I give thee if thou wilt 
fall down and worship me.’ 

Abraham too, as it seems to me, has these 
three trials at the outset of his ministry. He 
is first assailed by famine; the bodily nature 
is made on the very threshold to protest 


ABRAHAM THE COSMOPOLITAN 121 


against the enterprise; it is a temptation to 
abandon the work. Then comes a temptation, 
not to abandon, but to accelerate it by an 
exercise of physical power. It appears in the 
subtle effort to win the favour of Pharaoh by 
a worldly policy. Nor does Abraham come 
forth scatheless from the trial; he does cast 
himself down from the pinnacle of zs temple. 
But the third temptation is destined to redeem 
him, to wash him white. To him as to the 
future Messiah, there comes the call to an 
act of choice between worldly possessions. 
You will find it in the twelfth chapter of 
Genesis. Two fields stretch before the eyes of 
Abraham—the one fertile, the other seemingly 
barren. His kinsman Lot? is in search of the 
fertile field; he looks upon it with longing 
gaze as a source of independent empire. He 
would choose it if he could; but the choice 
lies not with him; it lies with Abraham. 
Will Abraham permit it? Will he allow a 
vassal to get the richer possession? Will he 


1 This is one of the characters whom I hope to treat in- 
dependently in a subsequent volume. 


122 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


suffer a dependant to receive the kingdoms of 
the world and the glory of them while he him- 
self is confined to the seemingly barren waste? 
Remember where Abraham’s temptation to 
the rich kingdom lay. It lay where Christ’s lay 
—not in covetousness but in usefulness. What 
could the pioneer of civilisation not have done 
with such a kingdom! Might not the cause 
of humanity be helped by riches! Might not 
the labours of the missionary be aided by the 
possession of private means! Might not the 
influence of the new movement be rendered 
more powerful if it were felt to come, not from 
the valley, but from the hill! 

Does Abraham, then, choose the richer pos- 
session? No; he selects the apparently barren 
one. Why? Because he does not want his 
followers to become a nation through out-door 
relief. God was to make of Azm a great 
nation. The race which he was to develop 
was to be developed by se/f/-culture—not by 
culture from without. To use his own words, 
no man was to say, ‘I have made Abraham 
rich.’ And so he gave up the mountain for 


ABRAHAM THE COSMOPOLITAN 123 


the valley. He went down—down to priva- 
tion, down to wandering, down to a life without 
a home, down to days of marching and nights 
of weariness. And with that selection of the 
valley there came to him another hour of the 
day of Jesus. When Christ took the lowly 
path in preference to the high one, ‘many of 
His disciples walked no more with Him.’ So 
is it here. The man enriched by Abraham’s 
own abstinence becomes the attraction. There 
is an exodus from the vale—an exodus from 
the camp of Abraham to the camp of Lot. 
The prospect of the loaves is too tempting. 
The chivalry of the master has itself provided 
the servant with the chance for desertion. 
Why seek a land in the future when there was 
aland here and now! Why journey through 
endless plains when there was a rest at the door! 
Was not home better than hardship, quiet 
superior to struggle, abundance preferable to 
scarcity! It was surely folly to pursue a dream 
when the waking reality stood before the eyes! 

And so, the camp of Abraham was thinned. 
His humanitarian scheme received a chill— 


124 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


a chill which came from the heat of his own 
generosity. This was the saddest hour of his 
life, as I think the corresponding period was 
the saddest hour in the life of Jesus. Yet, as 
to the soul of Jesus this hour was the prelude 
to a great revelation, so to the spirit of 
Abraham it was the forerunner of a vision of 
glory ; here again was the experience of the 
missionary to anticipate the Day of the Lord. 
Abraham too was in the hour of his seeming 
failure to have a scene of transfiguration. 
While he stands dejected on the desert waste, 
there flashes before his sight a wonderful 
vision. An empire rises to his view—an 
empire such as Man had never seen. It 
stretches to all ends of the earth—north, south, 
east, west. It embraces all ages of time—it is 
to endure forever. It comprehendsall varieties 
of men—its inhabitants are to be as the dust 
of the earth for multitude. Above all, it is 
a kingdom whose foundation is to be laid in 
righteousness—a kingdom bestowed by God, 
chartered by the will of heaven, ‘unto thee will 
I give it. Such is the vision which in his 


ABRAHAM THE COSMOPOLITAN 125 


hour of sadness floats before the eyes of 
Abraham. From the place where he stood he 
saw the promised land; and the place where 
he stood was transfigured. It lost its obscure 
character; it became a centre, a metropolis, a 
highway for the nations. He beheld it already 
glorified—transformed from a field of tents 
into a city of palaces within whose walls are 
gathered the worshippers of the living God. 
The scene passed, and Abraham descended 
into common day. He came down into life’s 
rough reality. And the reality was rough 
indeed. Around him was a growing corrup- 
tion. The plains of Sodom were a sink of 
iniquity. They seemed to breathe derision 
upon his dream of moral glory. Yet, here 
again, if chronology did not prevent it, we 
should almost persuade ourselves that we 
heard the coming tread of the Man of Nazareth. 
We remind ourselves that it is after Christ’s 
vision of transfigured glory that He meets the 
demoniac on the plain, and that the power of 
healing lay with the Heart which had seex the 
glory. We hear the question asked by the 


126 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


disciples who had remained below, ‘Why 
could not we cast out the demon?’ and we 
feel the answer to be, ‘Because you did not see 
the glory.’ All this passes before us as we 
stand in front of the Picture of Abraham. 
This man is strengthened for Sodom by the 
vision of the glory. In sublime accents he 
lifts up his voice to plead for the doomed land. 
Almost, for a moment, we should imagine that 
we heard Christ weeping over Jerusalem! I say 
‘almost’ and ‘for a moment.’ Do not think 
that the day of Abraham ever reached beyond 
the dawn of Christ’s day. With all its analogies 
of experience, it was still the analogy between 
the child and the man. The tears of Abraham 
over Sodom do not really equal the tears of 
Jesus over Jerusalem. The pity of Abraham 
was pity for the righteous; the pity of Jesus 
was pity for the fallen. Abraham beheld gold 
amid the clay, and lamented that the gold 
should perish wztk the clay; Jesus beheld the 
clay wzthout the gold, and wept because its 
wealth had never come. Abraham prayed for 
the ten righteous men who might possibly be 


ABRAHAM THE COSMOPOLITAN 127 


left in Sodom; Jesus shed tears of agony over 
those degenerate thousands who crowded the 
streets of Jerusalem. The reign of absolute 
mercy had not yet begun; the Gospel of 
unconditional grace was still afar off. It was 
as yet rather charity than love—rather the 
suspending of judgment than the following of 
condemnation by forgiveness. Abraham was 
only in the dawn; but he was in the dawn. 
He had caught a glow of the sunrise—of human 
possibilities; he had gathered fresh hope for 
Man. It was for other ages to extend his 
labours. 

And here the cosmopolitan picture shades 
into another. Have you ever marked the 
peculiarity in the delineation of this figure of 
Abraham? The ordinary course of life is to 
begin in the interior and then spread out 
toward the sea. But Abraham’s life begins by 
the sea, and then makes its way to the interior. 
Most of us are individuals first and cosmopoli- 
tans afterwards; Abraham is a cosmopolitan 
at the beginning, and an individual at the end. 
His life opens on the pathway of the nations. 


128 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


He feels that he has a mission to the masses. 
The destiny which floats before him is a world- 
destiny. His first visions are visions on a 
large scale. He contemplates not men, but 
kingdoms—not units, but multitudes. His aim 
is to found an empire—an empire for God and 
righteousness. His eye is on things which 
suggest the boundless; he looks at the stars 
of night and dreams of magnitudes. Such is 
the morning; what of the afternoon? Here 
all is changed; the broad sea becomes a 
narrow lake. The man who at the opening of 
the day has only an eye for multitudes sub- 
sides at evening into the family circle. The 
starry dome is exchanged for the precincts of 
the tent. The sacrificial character remains; 
but its sphere is altered. It ceases to be a 
sacrifice for the zatzons ; it becomes a surrender 
to the hearth. Its range at mofning was 
humanitarian ; towards evening it has become 
a household fire. The life which began with 
obedience to the mandate, ‘Get thee out of thy 
country!’ culminates in a submission of the 


will to a threatened family bereavement. Into 


ABRAHAM THE COSMOPOLITAN 129 


this inland experience our study follows him 
not. It is an experience which has had special 
interest for the theologian; to us its only in- 
terest is its bearing on the succeeding Portrait. 
We will leave Abraham where we found him— 


standing by the humanitarian sea. 


THANK Thee, O Lord, for my glimpses 

of the coming day! I thank Thee that 
there are prophetic moments in which I have 
sight of what wz// be! Why should I zot have 
such moments! Hast Thou not given to the 
swallow the vision of a summer which is yet 
far away! Hast Thou not given to the bee 
the vision of many mansions that are to come! 
And shall my soul have no guide toward zts 
morrow; shall my heart have no prophecy 
of the undawned day! My Father, Thou hast 
not left me thus comfortless. To me, as to 
Abraham, there have come intimations of a 
larger country and premonitions of a wider 
brotherhood. As I have strayed below the 
stars, I have asked myself if these a/one have 

en! 


130 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


unity. I have asked if there is no law that can 
so bind human lives. I have said, ‘Is Thy 
blessing alone for Esau—for rough material 
things; hast Thou no word for Jacob—no bond 
of the spirit!’ And as I said it, I knew that it 
was a voice from Zee,a prophecy from Thee. 
I bless Thee for that prophecy, O my God! 
Henceforth the stars say to me, ‘So shall thy 
seed be!’ Hasten, my Father, this day of 
Thy Christ! Unite the souls of men as Thou 
hast united the orbs of heaven! May the 
bells of union ring across the snow! Ring out 
the separation of countries and kindreds! 
Ring out the pride of race and the jealousy of 
privilege! Ring out the passion for monopoly 
and the lust for special power! Ring out the 
wars that sever the cities of the plain! Ring 
in the bond of brotherhood, the law of love, 
the harmony of helpfulness, the chord of com- 
passion, the fulness of fellowship, the music of 
mercy, the chant of charity, the symphony of 
now silent souls! I deszre to hear it; and when 
I hear it I shall be glad. 


_ = 


CHAPTER VII 
ISAAC THE DOMESTICATED 


SIDE by side with the figure of Abraham 
stands in the Great Gallery the form of his 
son Isaac. Yet nothing can exceed the con- 
trast between these figures. One would imagine 
that they were painted by two artists of differ- 
ent lands. No ancient nation but Israel could 
have exhibited such variety in its types of 
heroism. Abraham, spite of his cosmopolitan- 
ism, has an element in common with the ideal 
of the o/d world. He is the type of masculine 
strength. He represents human activity— 
man cleaving his way by the sheer manipula- 
tion of energy. But Isaac is distinctively a 
female type. He reveals human nature in a 
passive attitude—precisely that attitude which 
the old world did not like. In passing from 


Abraham to Isaac, we seem to be passing from 
131 


122 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


a mountain torrent to a stagnant pool. We 
come from the running into the rest, from 
the hurry into the hush, from the sound into 
the silence. Abraham is the father, and Isaac is 
the son; yet the sphere of the son seems more 
curtailed than that of the father. We expect 
generations to be progressive, to branch out as 
they grow. But here, as the generation grows, 
it would almost seem as if the original branches 
were lopped away and the tree of life were 
diminished. As the two figures stand before us 
we are tempted to say, ‘ Abraham is the young 
man and Isaac the old.’ In coming from the 
father to the son, we have come from the 
world into the nursery, from the guidance of 
nations to the care of children. Abraham has 
the foreign mission; Isaac has the home 
mission. Abraham has to civilise a world; 
Isaac has to train a family. Abraham plants 
colonies; Isaac digs wells. Abraham over- 
awes his opponents; Isaac shrinks from con- 
flict. Abraham treads a political arena and 
restrains wrong; Isaac walks within his own 


house and restrains himself. 


ISAAC THE DOMESTICATED _133 


But, conceding the full force of the contrast, 
are you sure that it indicates an anti-climax ? 
Admitting that Abraham’s sphere is the world 
and I[saac’s the domestic altar, are you certain 
that the latter is the scene of a diminished 
energy? I am myself quite certain of the 
contrary. I feel convinced that service be- 
comes more arduous in proportion as the 
sphere narrows. I have often been struck with 
these words of Jesus, ‘He that is faithful in 
that which is least, is faithful also in much.’ 
They are not the common measurement. The 
common measurement is, ‘He that is faithful 
in that which is large, is faithful in that which 
is small.’ On what ground does Christ invert 
the order? On the ground of deep spiritual 
insight—insight which experience has con- 
firmed. Many a man has been great in the 
winter blast and fretted in the presence of the 
summer shower. Many a man has borne his 
cross in public with splendid magnanimity and 
sunk beneath it in the silence of his own room. 
Many a man in the exchange and in the forum 
has an admirable command of temper, who 


134 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


yet in the precincts of his home is a bully and 
a tyrant. Many a man is the soul of chivalry 
to strangers, and the essence of rudeness to his 
own sisters or daughters. Why isthis? The 
short and easy answer is that there is hypocrisy 
in the human race. I do not think that is the 
explanation. I take the reason to be the 
principle enunciated by Jesus. The wider 
sphere may be more prolific in influence, but 
the narrow one is richer in sacrifice. It is 
richer in sacrifice because it is more barren of 
stimulus. It reveals no cloud of witnesses. It 
displays no prizes for success. It offers no 
prospect of outward plaudits. The virtues of 
the home circle are spontaneous virtues. They 
have nothing to cultivate them from without ; 
they must grow by their own strength, or not 
grow at all. 

There is a remarkable passage in the Epistle 
to the Hebrews in which it is stated that Jesus 
‘suffered outside the camp.’ I take the idea 
to be that the trials of a captain are greater 
when they are unappreciated by the army— 
when they have to be borne in the silence of 


ISAAC THE DOMESTICATED 135 


his own breast. The life of Isaac is from 
beginning to end a suffering in private. His 
was that form of sacrifice which does not show, 
which wins no reputation for heroism. But 
just on that account it had a value all its own. 
The sacrifices of Abraham were on the line of 
the world’s march, and they received the 
stimulus which comes from being conscious of 
the world’s eye. The sacrifices of Isaac came 
from the unaided heart. They were the pro- 
duct of an unassisted will. They were the 
revealing of private sentiments, of strength 
exhibited in seclusion. In Isaac we have the 
impression not of hearing, but of overhearing. 
We seem to be listening to a beautiful singer 
who imagines himself unheard; and we give 
him the credit of the imagined solitude. We 
feel that his singing comes purely from de- 
votion to the music. He is like an artist 
painting in a desert—painting in the firm belief 
that none will ever see his work. We bow 
reverently before the evidence of unconstrained 
devotion, of unalloyed love for that which is 
intrinsically fair; and we feel that the absence 


136 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


of witnesses has itself contributed a fresh 
homage to the worship of truth and beauty. 

I think you will find that in the delinea- 
tions of the Great Bible Gallery each life has 
one typical incident—one event which in small 
compass expresses the whole essence of the 
character. Peter is typified by his sea-walk- 
ing—his alternate moments of buoyancy and 
sinking. John is epitomised in his rest on the 
bosom of Jesus. Paul is summed up in his 
Adriatic voyage—tossed between the intel- 
lectual waves of Asia and Europe. Elijah is 
typed in his chariot of fire. David is photo- 
gsraphed sweeping the strings of the harp— 
weaving the discords of Israel into a great and 
glorious harmony. Abraham has his keynote 
in the command to leave his country for a 
larger country—for the citizenship of the world. 
Isaac zoo has his typical incident, the event 
which sums up his whole life. What is that? 
It is the sacrifice of Mount Moriah. As a 
mere incident it would have little significance ; 
its importance lies in the fact that in one 


touch of the pencil it portrays the character, 


ISAAC THE DOMESTICATED 137 


the life, the distinctive destiny of the man. 
Let us consider this. 

When the scene of Isaac’s life opens, he is a 
youth. But itis not with the wonted attributes 
of youth that he is introduced to us. Youth 
is wont to manifest itself in the effort at 
independence; Isaac appears before us bound. 
Our first sight of him is the sight of an unre- 
sisting victim on an altar of sacrifice. His 
father Abraham has bound him there in the 
belief that heaven had commanded it. But 
you will miss the point if you imagine that 
the attitude of Isaac is that of a mere victim. 
It is that of acquiescence. The light in which 
he is brought before us is that of filial 
obedience, not of constrained obedience. He 
is seen unresistingly submitting to an act 
because it is the work of his father. He 
does not understand the wisdom of the act 
any more than his father understands it. 
What he does understand is that he is obeying 
his father. The obedience is with him a 
voluntary deed, a surrender of wz//. In the 
deepest sense, Isaac has bound Azmself to the 


138 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


altar. He has submitted to self-effacement 
for the sake of his family. That submission 
is, I say, the type of his whole life. He is 
always bound to a domestic altar. From first 
to last he is offered up in sacrifice to the will 
of his family. At every turn of life he is 
forced to give up the public for the private 
sphere, to exchange the gaze on the ocean 
for the walk by the stream. He is the fore- 
runner of all domestic drudges, of all who 
lose promotion through the impediments of 
home. Isaac is the bird that is prevented 
from soaring by the requirements of its nest. 
When he puts out his wings to fly, he finds 
ever that he is bound fast to a family altar— 
that identical altar to which early in life’s 
morning he was bound by his father Abraham. 

We see a remarkable instance of this in 
the first revelation which Isaac receives from 
heaven. It is the revelation to a young man, 
but it is very unlike that form of inspiration 
which we poetically associate with youth. We 
associate youth with the wings of the morning, 
with the promise and the power of a majestic 


ISAAC THE DOMESTICATED 139 


flight. We hear God speaking to every young 
man in his aspiration to vzse, to break from 
his narrow limits and soar to higher spheres. 
So had the voice come to Abraham, ‘Get thee 
out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and 
from thy father’s house, into a land which I 
will show thee!’ That is the typical revela- 
tion to the spirit of youth. But what would 
you think if your son were to say to you one 
morning, ‘I have been offered a_ lucrative 
appointment of commanding influence, but I 
intend to refuse it; God has revealed to me 
that my sphere is one of humble service and 
commonplace duty!’ Would you not deem it 
an incongruous thing that a lad with the world 
before him and with the possibilities of the 
world in his view, should voluntarily elect to 
shut himself in a cellar! 

Now, some such want of enterprise seems 
at first sight to be involved in the revelation 
claimed by Isaac. There is a famine in the 
land of Gerar, the humble place of his abode. 
This is, in other words, to say that it was a 


place with no prospect of promotion. The 


140 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


eyes of the young man naturally turned to 
Egypt. It was a centre, a place of possi- 
bilities, a thoroughfare for the nations. The 
census periodically tells us that our villages 
are gradually being depopulated by migration 
into the towns. From a cosmopolitan stand- 
point, Gerar was a village and Egypt a town. 
The natural impulse of Isaac was to emigrate, 
to seek the centre. What prevented him? 
He said he had a prohibitive revelation. He 
maintained that the voice of the Lord had 
come to him with the command, ‘Thou shalt 
not go down into Egypt; dwell in Gerar!’ 
Could he be right in his conclusion! Could 
such a message come from God! Is it not a 
breach of religious art to represent itso! Is 
not the Picture of Abraham more true to the 
Divine ideal than the Picture of Isaac! Why 
should a Divine revelation be described as 
coming for the express purpose of curtailing 
the energies of a man! 

But in asking this we are under the delusion 
that a curtailed sphere is a curtailed energy. 


It is not; a service is more arduous in propor- 


ISAAC THE DOMESTICATED 141 


tion as it is humble. My own opinion is 
that there is nothing which demands so much 
religious strength as the sense of a shut 
gate. Let us try to put the experience of 
Isaac in a modern dress; you will find that 
probably this was also its original dress. Let 
us say that this young man at the moment 
when he was about to step into a wider arena 
was prostrated by sudden illness—an illness 
which permanently enfeebled his capacities 
for outward work. Let us say that for an 
hour he fretted and fumed over the narrowing 
of his destiny, and cast a longing eye on the 
Egypt which he could not enter. Let us say 
that then there came into his mind a thought 
which breathed an unspeakable calm, ‘Is not 
this sickness the voice of God, is not this door 
shut by God!’ I say that to be calmed by such 
a thought is the greatest triumph religion ever 
secured. It is easy to hear God’s voice com- 
manding you to go ouz; but it needs faith to 
recognise it when it bids you go in. When 
Paul hears a voice, ‘I will send you far hence 


to the Gentiles, he can readily say, ‘It is the 


142 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


Lord’; but when Isaac hears a voice, ‘ Stay at 
home!’ he may well ask,‘ Who speaks?’ It 
is a grand thing in Isaac to recognise the 
Lord’s voice in the accident that maimed him. 
It is a grand thing that he is able to say, 
‘The altar to which I am bound is ztse/f my 
destiny. We deem that man godly who can 
accept a wider field of labour; but I think the 
man requires more godliness still who can 
accept as a gift from God the curtailment of a 
field which he believed to be all his own. 
What, then, is this corner to which Isaac is 
limited? It is the most commonplace work in 
the world. He has exchanged the firmament 
for the farmyard. His father Abraham had 
swept the horizon with the eye of faith and 
read his destiny in the stars of heaven. The 
gaze of Isaac is on the ground; his eye rests 
in pools of water. Read that passage so 
remarkable in its prosaicness, which occurs in 
the twenty-sixth chapter of Genesis: ‘Isaac 
digged again the wells of water, which they 
had digged in the days of Abraham his father ; 
for the Philistines had stopped them after the 


ISAAC THE DOMESTICATED 143 


death of Abraham: and he called their names 
after the names by which his father had called 
them.’ Is this the occupation of ahero! It 
does not seem so. But if you look deeper into 
this dusty soil, you will find diamonds—the 
most sparkling diamonds of Isaac’s life. No- 
where to my mind does his character shine 
out so resplendent as in this commonplace 
passage. We see again a man bound to a 
domestic altar-—the altar of filial love. Again 
he offers himself, as a sacrifice, to his father 
Abraham. Abraham is dead, but his memory 
lives, and his memory is potent with Isaac. 
It is not often that a new generation aims at 
glorifying the generation that has passed away. 
We are all apt to have a patronising pity for 
the wells which our fathers have dug—to feel 
how much better ovr workmanship would have 
been. But here is a man on fire with the love 
of yesterday! His whole aim is to glorify 
the past—even at his own expense to glorify 
it. He disclaims originality for his workman- 
ship. He says, ‘These wells were made by 
my father; I have no credit in their construc- 


144 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


tion; I am only restoring the work which he 
did, and which after his death the Philistines 
undid.’ There is something very grand in 
the self-effacement implied in the words, ‘He 
called them by the names which his father 
Abraham had called them.’ Plagiarism would 
have been very easy; by no possibility could 
it have been detected; the signs of the 
original hand had been all obliterated. What 
made Isaac disclaim the authority? It was 
filial love. He was stz/Z bound to the altar 
of his father. Still, in spirit, was he standing 
upon Mount Moriah. Still was he offering 
himself to a parent’s service. Still was he 
surrendering his own life to crown the life that 
gave him birth. There is no more beautiful 
episode than the naming of these common- 
place wells! 

I am not at all sure that this self-effacement 
on the part of Isaac came from a quiet nature; 
nor do I think this is the conception of the 
artist. I think he wants us to contemplate 
Isaac as a very strong man. There are two 
kinds of self-effacement—very different from 


ISAAC THE DOMESTICATED 145 


each other, but equally implying power. There 
is a self-effacement which consists in taking 
on, and there is a self-effacement which con- 
sists in giving up. The first was that of 
Abraham. His surrender was not so much 
a parting with possessions as a sharing of 
possessions. If he gave up his country and 
his kindred, it was for a larger country and 
a wider kindred. His watchword was not 
‘abnegation, but ‘sympathetic appropriation’ ; 
he took on him the burdens of others. But 
Isaac belongs to the second order. His sacri- 
fice takes the form of personal divestiture. It 
is true he has to give up nothing but his will. 
Neither on Mount Moriah nor afterwards is 
he required to divest himself of an actual 
garment. His sacrifice is all inward—all of 
the will. What he gives on Moriah is not his 
life, but his willingness to surrender it; what 
he gives in Gerar is not a possession, but his 
consent to abstain from it. Yet the man who 
can give his will has given everything. He 
who can empty himself of his dearest desire 
has reached the acme of self-abnegation—a 
K 


146 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


height of abnegation to which nothing could 
add. And there is nothing which could accom- 
plish such a work but energy, the perfection 
of mental strength. It is a strong thing to 
lift your brother’s burden and put it on your 
own shoulders; but to lift your own joy and 
put it away from you, to refuse to stretch out 
your hand to grasp a coming gain, requires, 
I think, a nerve stronger still. 

A fine instance of this occurs in the waiving 
of his partiality for his best loved son Esau in 
favour of the less loved son Jacob. We speak 
of Abraham offering up his son Isaac; did it 
ever strike any one that Isaac offered up his 
son Esau? We almost seem to find the in- 
fluence of heredity—the two acts are so much 
alike. In both cases it is a surrender of will; 
in both it is a surrender to what is believed to 
be the Divine pleasure. Isaac, like Abraham, 
has ason whom he loves. He sends for him 
to bless him. But it is in the days of his old 
age,and his eye has become dim. His hands 
are guided to the head of the wrong man; he 
gives the blessing to Jacob that was meant for 


ISAAC THE DOMESTICATED 147 


Esau. Immediately, he accepts the accident 
as the will of God. Though it is dead against 
his own will, though it is the result of a cruel 
deception, he receives it as the decree of 
heaven. With a determined fatalism he cruci- 
fies his own desire in obedience to what he 
deems the counsel of eternity. It is in vain 
that Esau pleads. His father’s heart is with 
him; but his creed is stronger than his heart. 
That creed is the belief that whatever happens 
becomes God’s will—even though it has been 
produced by bad agencies. The misguiding 
of the blind man’s hand was a sin; but the 
touch of that hand was a fact. Being a fact, 
it had passed into the hands of God. It had 
become part of the universe. Man could not 
revoke it; anger could not annul it; regret 
could not gainsay it—it was henceforth the 
will of heaven. 

Now, the question which I put is this, Did 
the artist mean this Portrait to be the re- 
presentative of sentimental weakness? Is it 
not clear he meant the reverse! To me the 


figure of Isaac suggests rather one of Crom- 


148 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


well’s Ironsides than one of earth’s weaklings, 
The blood in his veins is akin to that of the 
Puritans. His was the surrender of a will, 
not the crushing of a will—there is a great 
difference between these two. The crushing of 
a will brings vacancy; the surrender of a will 
is itself an exercise of will-fower. To my 
mind there is no more majestic spectacle than 
that of the old blind man bereft of all the 
qualities which constitute pagan greatness, yet 
ruling his clan with authority unbroken. It 
is one of the finest tributes to the majesty of 
inward strength which has ever been painted 
by any literature. It is a tribute to feminine 
strength, bearing strength, passive strength— 
a tribute which was not to be excelled till the 
Son of Man built on the Mount His monu- 
ment to the greatness of a surrendered will, 
and inscribed on it the words, ‘Blessed are 
the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of 
heaven !’ 

And is it not a sense of this feminine type 
of greatness which has constrained the artist 
in Genesis to give woman a place so high! 


ISAAC THE DOMESTICATED 149 


Nowhere is the Bible so modern as in its 
opening pages. The domestic hearth of the 
Book of Genesis hardly seems an ancient 
picture. There the kingdom of woman is 
recognised. There she is the head of the 
home—I had almost said, the head of the 
Patriarchs, At a time when elsewhere she is 
either a drudge or a plaything the Gallery of 
Genesis has represented her as free. Nay, she 
is there more than free; she is compelling. 
Woman would almost seem to give the law 
to man. Sarah dominates Abraham ; Rebekah 
sways Isaac. It would make no difference 
though you could prove that the empire only 
existed in the fancy of the artist. The value 
lies in the thought, the idea, the aspiration. 
It lies in the fact that in these days there 
were minds that aspired to the emancipation 
of woman, minds that saw afar off the recog- 
nition of her equal rights with man. And 
they saw this because they saw more. Their 
appreciation of the claims of woman came from 
their appreciation of passzve strength. They 
thought her worthy to be exalted, because 


150 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


they thought the domestic virtues worthy to 
be exalted. They had an anticipative vision 
of the Mount of Beatitudes, an impression that 
the time would come when the virtues of the 
valley would be hailed as the virtues of the hill. 
The fruit of that vision is the enthroning 
among the patriarchs of a distinctively feminine 
soul—a soul whose greatness lay in self-denial 
and whose majesty was his willingness to take 


the lower room. 


THOU who on the mount hast blessed 

the virtues of the valley, let me enter 

into that blessing! Let me stand on the hill 
with Thee and see the exalting of lowly 
things! I used to think the Isaacs of life 
were unfit to survive. I thought they had no 
force, no character, no strength to breast the 
storm. I thought they would be swept away 
by the first wind that blew. I was wrong. 
Not undesignedly does Isaac precede Ishmael 
in Thy Gallery! The Isaacs have had the 
inward strength; theirs has been the king- 


ISAAC THE DOMESTICATED 151 


dom of heaven, theirs has been the inherit- 
ance of the earth, theirs has been the fame 
of being called the children of God. I passed 
them by on the way; I rejected them as 
stones for my building; but they have 
become the chief pillars in 7hy house. I 
thank Thee that Thou hast made a crown 
for Calvary! I thank Thee that Thou hast 
wreathed the brow of patient pain! I thank 
Thee that Thou hast a palm for the unrepin- 
ing! No more can I behold the invalid with 
condescending pity. No more can I view him 
as a lame man before a shut gate. His weak- 
ness is itself his possible gate to glory. Thou 
hast made his pain his portal. Thou hast 
called his waiting work. Thou hast deemed 
his silence service. Thou hast regarded his 
patience as praise. Thou hast accepted his 
tearlessness as tribute. Thou hast received 
his faith as a fighting. Thou hast hailed his 
valley as a victory. The hearts that have sung 
in the night are the heroes of 7/y Pantheon; 
in this Thou hast fulfilled the promise, ‘In 
Isaac shall thy seed be called.’ 


CHAPTER VIII 
JACOB THE ASPIRING 


THE figure which next meets us in the Bible 
Gallery is one which in my opinion has been 
generally misinterpreted; it is the form of 
Jacob. The common view is that this Picture 
is a delineation of human inconsistency. We 
are accustomed to think of Jacob as a charac- 
ter of lights and shadows mingling without 
reason. We see in him an unstable tempera- 
ment—a life that has no settled purpose, no 
forecast plan, but which is swayed alter- 
nately by impulses of good and impulses of 
evil. We figure him as essentially a weak 
nature—vacillating ever between the day and 
the night, and unable to concentrate his mind 
upon a definite resolve. 

And indeed, as commonly understood, the 


Portrait of this man does present an inconsis- 
152 


JACOB THE ASPIRING 153 


tency. Let us consider the recognised inter- 
pretation. There are two young men, we are 
told, of absolutely opposite characters—the 
brothers Jacob and Esau. Esau is the man of 
the present ; Jacob is the man of the future. 
Esau is never able to look beyond the hour ; 
Jacob has his thoughts always on the morrow. 
Esau is absorbed in the pleasures of sense; 
Jacob is intent on the pursuit of gain. Esau 
cares for nothing but a merry life; Jacob is 
willing to endure laborious days in the acquisi- 
tion of material wealth. Esau has the dis- 
position of a spendthrift; Jacob has the nature 
of a miser. 

By and by there happens the inevitable. 
Esau finds himself in temporary embarrass- 
ment. He asks his brother fora loan. Jacob 
consents on one condition—that he will sell for 
the loan his birthright, his right to inherit his 
father’s property. Esau agrees; the impulse of 
the moment is too strong for him. But when 
the moment has passed he regrets; he would fain 
undo. He feels that he has been overreached— 
that his brother has traded upon the weak 


154 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


point in his character. Dark thoughts rise 
within him; he prepares for vengeance. Jacob 
has a premonition of danger; he takes refuge 
in flight. All day he travels in wild haste; 
and at night, footsore and weary, he comes to 
a desert spot, a weird and waste solitude. 
Uninviting as it is for rest, he can go 
no farther; he throws himself down ex- 
hausted upon a heap of stones, and falls 
asleep. 

And then begins the seeming inconsistency. 
This apparently bad man has a _ beautiful 
dream—a dream so beautiful that it has 
become immortal. What the des¢ men of the 
past had not seen, this fraudulent youth beholds. 
Heaven is opened to his sight, and the home 
of the Eternal is brought nigh. From earth 
to sky there stretches a great ladder, and on 
its steps ascend and descend the angels of 
God. Now, the question we ask is this, Why 
did the artist give such a vision to such a 
man? Are not our dreams the product of our 
past! Do we ever in any sphere see a breach 


of evolution! Does a prosaic man leap all at 


JACOB THE ASPIRING Isc 


once into poetry; does a worldly life bound 
without warning into religiousness! On the 
contrary, when you see sudden changes, you 
know assuredly that somewhere in the past 
there was a match struck. We see Nicodemus 
embalming the dead Christ, and we marvel; 
by and by we find that he had previously met 
Jesus by night. We behold Saul of Tarsus 
transformed into Paul the Apostle, and we 
wonder; presently we learn that for a long 
time he had found it hard to struggle against 
the majesty of Jesus. The same such wonder 
meets us here. The youth who of all others 
is apparently most immersed in the waters of 
earth has a clearer view of the sunlight than 
all who had gone before him. Can we explain 
the paradox? 

I think we can explain it, but not on the 
old interpretation of the narrative. On the 
supposition that Jacob was a common miser 
living only for the acquisition of material 
gain, his vision of the heavenly communion 
remains either a psychological puzzle or an 
artistic blemish. But is this the correct 


156 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


supposition? I say itis not. I feel sure that 
the previous life of Jacob has not been that 
prosaic thing which the popular view would 
have us believe. I am convinced that, accord- 
ing to the narrative, according to the concep- 
tion of the artist, this dream of the night was 
in the first instance a dream of the morning, 
and that the vision which Jacob saw in the 
desert was the vision which had followed 
him amid the haunts of men. I will try to 
indicate the reason which has led me to this 
conclusion. 

To the ordinary English reader there is a 
sharp contrast between Jacob’s coveting of the 
birthright and Jacob’s dream of Divine com- 
munion. Really, however, so far from being 
contrasted, the latter is a development from 
the former. Jacob’s coveting of the birthright 
was nothing more or less than the beginning 
of hisdream. What was this birthright ? The 
inheritance of the father’s property, you say. 
Yes; but what was the father’s property which 
the eldest son inherited? In England we 


associate that institution with something very 


JACOB THE ASPIRING 157 


material—with stone and lime, fields and 
acres, houses and lands. But in Patriarchal 
days this was notits association. Toa son of 
the Patriarchal House the birthright of the 
firstborn was the High Priesthood. In the 
public estimation Abraham and Isaac were not 
simply rulers; they were the priests of the 
clan, the sacred ministers of the community. 
To them it belonged to offer sacrifice, to them 
it pertained to pour out intercession. They 
were the ladders of communion between earth 
and heaven, on whose steps went up the 
prayers of the people; they bore the weight 
of the national supplication. It was to this 
ministry in holy things that the firstborn was 
heir. This was his right of primogeniture ; 
this was his prospective privilege. And it 
was this which Jacob coveted. This was from 
the beginning his dream—the dream of being 
the ladder of family communion. By order 
of birth he was debarred from that privilege. 
Esau was the firstborn, and Esau had the 
claim. But to the eye of Jacob, Esau was 
unfit for the office. He was a secular man, a 


158 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


man of weights and measures; he had no 
taste for matters ecclesiastical. To Jacob it 
was a hard thing that the lot had fallen upon 
the wrong man; and the sense of the incon- 
gruity made him dream all the more. 

Jacob, then, appears from the very outset as 
a mentally aspiring man. His dream at Bethel 
was no accident; it was a result of his whole 
past. What he there saw under the stars, 
he had seen in his heart from the very dawn. 
It had been the dream of his life to be this 
ladder, this medium of communion. To 
express it in modern language, his ambition 
was to be a son of the Church. He wanted to 
be the cleric of the family, the ecclesiastic of 
the clan; this was his aspiration, this was his 
dream. And in itself it was a noble dream. 
I do not wish to obscure the defects of Jacob; 
but I cannot see either from the standpoint 
of the artist, or from the standpoint of the 
historian, that one of these defects was the 
desire for the birthright or the regret that it 
had not fallen to him. Paul says there isa 
noble covetousness; he bids us ‘covet the 


JACOB THE ASPIRING 159 


best gifts.’ Jacob’s position was not unlike 
that of many a poor student—poor, I mean, 
in worldly goods, who is prevented by that 
poverty from gratifying the dearest desire of 
his life—the desire to be a minister of religion. 
He sees hundreds entering into the temple 
from which he is excluded—hundreds with- 
out his gifts, securing the upper seats in the 
synagogue. Is it strange, is it ignoble, that 
he should fret against the bars! Jacob hada 
similar excuse for his covetousness. His 
barrier was not want of money, but want of 
primogeniture; yet it was equally an external 
barrier. It was a merely technical disqualifi- 
cation for a post which otherwise was in every 
way adapted to his abilities. No wonder he 
dreamed of his missed destiny night and day! 
No wonder that, amid the cold and weariness 
of his Bethel vigil, the fancies of his sleep 
took neither the form of cold nor of weariness, 
but assumed the shape of a ladder between 
earth and heaven! 

But let us not forget that in Jacob’s Bethel 
dream there is a penal as well as a pleasurable 


160 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


element. He pronounced the spot of the vision 
to be a ‘dreadful place.’ This indicates that 
in some sense the scene jarred upon him—that 
it was not in every respect harmonious with 
his nature. The dream, in other words, had a 
retributive as well as a rewarding function. 
Before we can understand the nature of the 
retribution, we must put our hand upon the 
fault. Jacob ad a fault. His moral danger 
lay precisely at the point in which he was 
most strong—his lofty aspiration. His desire 
for the birthright was noble; it was the wish 
to enter the Church, to become a minister of 
religion. But why? Not yet for the Jove of 
the profession, but for the frzde of the profes- 
sion. He felt that to be a ladder of communion 
between earth and heaven was to assume a 
commanding position, the most commanding 
position in the world. The estate he desired 
was not one of stone and lime; but none the 
less was it one of exaltation. His eye was 
rather on the ascent than on the descent of 
the ladder. To be a churchman in those days 


was to be a power; it was to wield an influ- 


JACOB THE ASPIRING 161 


ence far beyond the strength of the secular 
arm. Jacob felt what many a young man 
now feels—the social uplifting involved in the 
clerical office; and he had more reason to feel it 
than any man has in our day. This was the fly 
in his ointment; this was the bane of his dream. 

And this was the feeling which the vision 
reproved. What was the cause of that dread 
which Jacob experienced after his Bethel 
dream? It was the sight of ascending and 
descending angels. To a selfish man, was 
there anything dreadful in such a spectacle 
as that? Not according to the common inter- 
pretation. The common interpretation is that 
some angels went up the ladder and others 
came down. I do not think this was the 
artist's meaning. Taking into account the 
ministrant character which the Hebrew attri- 
buted to the angels, I hold the meaning to be, 
not that some went up and others went down, 
but that those who went up came down again. 
This is evidently Paul’s view. When speaking 
of Christ’s union of exaltation and humiliation, 
he says: ‘He that descended is the same as 

L 


162 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


He that ascended.’ I understand him to mean 
that this is the true interpretation of Jacob’s 
ladder. Supposing it to be so, we get a flood 
of light upon the whole narrative—light which 
illuminates both the past and the future in the 
life of Jacob, light which helps us to compre- 
hend the weak point of his youthful dream, 
light which enables us to see the meaning of 
the shrunk sinew on the heights of Peniel. 

For, what does the vision say to the life- 
dream of Jacob? Is it not something like 
this: ‘ Jacob, you have been in a great delusion 
about this matter. You have been seeking 
the Divine Priesthood as a source of worldly 
power; it is in the first instance a source of 
worldly weakness. He who becomes the 
ladder between earth and heaven must bear 
henceforth the weight of the multitude. On 
him the crowd presses, on him the care 
descends. He goes up only that he may 
come down. If he ascends into the light of 
God, it is that he may descend into the night 
of Man. If he rises into the heavenly rest, it 
is that he may learn the earthly tossing on the 


JACOB THE ASPIRING 163 


pillow of stone. The birthright you seek is 
not to be found on the mountain, but in the 
valley. You think the securing of the prize 
would make you the superior of Esau; no, it 
would make you in a more direct sense than 
ever before the servantof Esau. The higher you 
would climb, the deeper must be your bending. 
The Divine right of kings is their right to be 
servants—servants to the lowliest, servants to 
those who lie on couches not of down. If you 
desire your brother’s birthright, it should be 
on the ground, not that you will gain more 
riches, but that you are capable of more sacri- 
fice than he.’ 

And is not the principle of this mystical 
ladder eternally true. Is it not a matter of 
experience that in the mental sphere the 
sacrifice belongs to the hezght. It is not a 
sense of want that stimulates sympathy; it 
is a sense of possession. Infirmaries came 
not from the sick, but from the strong. What 
has instituted asylums for the blind? It is 
the vision of ght; had darkness been per- 
petual and universal, there could have been no 


164 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


such institutions. What has instituted asylums 
for the imbecile? It is the sense of mental 
power; insanity knows not its own unsound- 
ness. What has instituted reformatories? It 
is the ideal of purzty; the unobstructed presence 
of sin would have made such homes impossible. 
The burdens of humanity belong to a soul in 
proportion to its perfection—not its imperfec- 
tion. I would apply this even to the education 
of children. Do not choose your nursery 
governess on the principle that, as she is only 
for the nursery, she had better not be too 
learned. The man or woman who has the 
highest knowledge of a subject will be the 
clearest teacher of that subject, will make it 
most plain to beginners. Those who are half- 
way up the ladder of knowledge never speak 
in parables; they are incapable of breaking 
the bread to their childlike disciples. But he 
who is on the topmost round can speak to the 
lowliest. He is the only teacher who is clear 
to the unlettered crowd. To him belongs the 
power of making simple; he alone can dis- 
course in parables, 


JACOB THE ASPIRING 165 


And does not the climax of this principle 
appear in the great central fact of Christianity 
itself. What zs that central fact? It is the 
sin-bearing of the sinless. The Fourth Evan- 
gelist calls Christ in express terms the ladder 
of Jacob, Whyso? Clearly because in Him 
the principle of that ladder finds its culmina- 
tion—the principle that the highest are the 
servants of the lowest. Of all the sons of the 
human race, there is only one who stands at 
the foot of the ladder—the Man who has been 
at the top of it. The hospital of the moral 
pestilence gets no support from any moral 
invalid. Each man of dyed garments avoids 
brushing against the dyed garments of his 
brother. Simon will not speak to Magdalene; 
they have both dyed garments, and neither 
will tolerate the other's dye. Neither Simon 
nor Magdalene has yet been up the ladder ; 
neither has received the birthright of priest- 
hood. But ome man has; amongst many 
brethren Jesus is the firstborn. And, because 
He alone has the birthright, He alone has the 
pain. The man who goes up to the heights of 


166 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


holiness is the man who must come down to 
the depths of sin—down to Simon, down to 
Magdalene, down to the lepers of corruption 
and the demoniacs of passion. Imagine a 
constitution of things in which every physical 
blow gave its pain, not to the man struck, but 
to some other man. We do not see this in the 
material world; but Christianity says that it 
is the law of the moral world. According to 
Christianity, it is the angel at the ‘of of the 
ladder who is bruised by the pillow of stone. 
The deepest moral corruption is unfelt by the 
man who possesses it. It is felt by the man 
who does zo? possess it, who walks in white by 
the side of the crystal river. The penalty of sin 
falls heaviest on the holy ; the Cross of Calvary 
first crucifies the pure. Spiritual elevation can 
never bring worldly elatzon. When Jacob 
reaches that summit of the ladder from which 
Esau is debarred, the sight of his debarred 
brother will be, not a triumph, but a trial. 
What was the effect of Jacob’s dream? In 
one word, it was ‘Peniel.’ We are in a great 


mistake if we imagine that there is no 


JACOB THE ASPIRING 167 


connection between the angels he beheld on the 
ladder and the angel with whom he wrestled 
until the breaking of the day. He never 
would have wrestled at Peniel if he had not 
dreamed at Bethel. The dream at Bethel gave 
him a conscience; there lay its terror, there 
lay its glory. It told him that the birthright 
he had received was a burden, a burden he 
was bound to bear. It told him that to be an 
angel of God was a very serious thing; it 
asked him if he had realised ow serious. 
When Jacob awoke, he awoke as a new man, 
or rather, with an additional man zz him. He 
had lain down a single individual; he rose a 
double consciousness. Two lives were within 
him, strove within him. There was the old 
life which he knew so well, and which he used 
to call ‘himself.’ That was still there, but it 
was no longer there alone. Another stood 
opposite to it and disputed its rule. That 
other was a life of strange appearance. It 
was like a flattering portrait of himself; but it 
seemed also to contradict himself. It resembled 
one of the angels of his dream. It was the 


168 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


presence in his soul of a new ideal—a new 
object for living. Hitherto, he had lived to 
overtop Hsau; but the new presence said, 
‘Let Esau overtop you!’ The new presence 
became very troublesome. It disputed with 
him constantly. It interrupted him in the 
market-place. It checked him at the receipt 
of custom. It barred him at the buying of 
land. It cried out when he gave false measure. 
It said at the most inconvenient times, ‘Remem- 
ber your brother !’—‘ Remember your neigh- 
bour!’—‘ Remember your fellow-man!’ It 
made him less sharp in bargaining, less acute 
in things pertaining to his interest. A certain 
kind of energy departed from him—the force 
called ‘grasping.’ Men saw the change, and 
described it to his disparagement. They 
expressed it epigrammatically by saying that 
there had been a shrinking in the sinew of his 
thigh. Yet it came not from a diminished, 
but from an added, energy; it was all the 
effect of the new conscience—the ministrant 
angel of the Bethel dream. 

There is a curious suggestion in the picture 


JACOB THE ASPIRING 169 


of this conflicting period of Jacob’s life. The 
angel with whom he is struggling is represented 
as saying, ‘Let me go! for the day breaketh.’ 
I understand this to mean that Jacob found 
it easier to be good by night than by day. 
I understand it to mean that he formed fine 
resolutions under the stars which he tended to 
break in the sunshine. He is not singular in 
this ; it is to some extent the experience of us 
all. There is a special solemnity about the 
night. I do not think it lies where it is sup- 
posed to lie—in the vastness of the spaces. 
Rather do I attribute it to an opposite impres- 
sion—the sense of individual nearness to the 
centre of things. Jacob grows solemn when he 
sees that heaven and earth have a ladder 
between them. This is ever the source of 
night’s solemnity. The individual feels him- 
self less the member of a crowd, more an 
object of solitary contemplation. The narrative 
says of Jacob, ‘When he was aéone there 
wrestled with him aman.’ It is by night that 
we most feel this solitude—so favourable to 
the wrestling angel. Our importance as units 


170 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


is magnified in the night. We seem to our: 
selves more worthy; therefore the ideal man 
within us awakes from his sleep and upbraids 
us. But when the day comes, we lose our 
individuality once more. Our sense of im- 
portance dies. We feel ourselves to be frag- 
ments again—atoms in the crowd, drops in the 
ocean of life. Conscience is never so low as 
when the pressure of the multitude makes me 
undervalue my own soul; and it is the day- 
break that brings the pressure. Night says, 
‘You are alone with God’; morning says, 
‘How can God be affected by a puny life like 
you!’ 

And this, I think, explains the fact that 
conscience is often most powerful in the hour 
of death. Then, as in the night, I feel myself 
alone. The crowd has melted from my view, 
and the fashion of this world is dissolving like 
a mimic scene, and there is none but God and 
I. Very finely has this principle been grasped 
by the great artist in Genesis. With strong 
persistency he has been making the solitary 
hours of Jacob his grand hours; the night of 


JACOB THE ASPIRING 171 


Bethel has been his golden dream, the nicht of 
Peniel his golden struggle. But his greatest 
glory is reserved for his hour of greatest 
solitude—the hour of death. There the angel 
of the ladder and of the struggle appears once 
more, and he appears as the climax of his 
former self. He is still the angel of ministra- 
tion; but he is no longer a mere helper to 
Jacob—he is inciting Jacob to bless others. 
The dying man becomes for the first time the 
universal benefactor. In his hour of death 
the ministrant conscience becomes dominant, 
supreme, Overmastering. Even the poetry of 
his language, grand as it is, is left in the shade 
by the glow of his altruism. He has no thought 
for anything private, anything local, anything 
personal. He has emancipated himself from 
individual ambition. His aspiring has become 
unselfish. His own griefs and joys are for- 
gotten. The ¢rzdes of Israel glitter in his 
sight—their duties and their dangers. The 
burdens of the people crowd upon his heart— 
their weightedness and their soreness. His 
hour of death is his hour of priesthood ; he has 


172, THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


only reached the birthright in the valley of 
the shadow. 


ORD, give me the blessing of Jacob— 

his best blessing—his power to bless! 
Doubtless it must come with a shrunk sinew; 
I cannot keep the song of the lark when I get 
the seal of sonship; I must enter into the pain 
of my Lord. Yet that pain is better than the 
world’s joy. I have heard men speak of pain 
as a blot on Thy universe. They were wrong; 
it is the birthright of the wnblotted. Give me 
this birthright,O my God! Put the scar of 
sympathy in my heart! Let me feel my 
brother’s thorn! Make it impossible for me 
to stay at the top of the ladder, even though 
that be heaven! Send me down the golden 
stair—down to the pillows of stone, down to 
the nights of sorrow, down to the limbs that 
are languid, down to the souls that are sad! 
Send me with a breath of Eden, send me with 
a flower of Paradise, send me with a cluster of 
the grapes of Canaan! Send me to the hours 


JACOB THE ASPIRING 173 


that precede the daybreak—those darkest 
hours which come before the dawn! Send me 
to the hearts without a home, to the lives 
without a love, to the crowds without a com- 
pass, to the ranks without a refuge! Send me 
to the children that none have blessed, to the 
famished that none have fed, to the sick that 
none have visited, to the demoniac that none 
have calmed, to the fallen that none have 
lifted, to the leper that none have touched, to 
the bereaved that none have comforted! Then 
shall I have the birthright of the firstborn; 
then shall I have the blessing of the mighty 
God of Jacob, 


CHAPTER IX 
JOSEPH THE OPTIMIST 


THE figure which stands next in the group 
of the Great Gallery is perhaps the most 
popular of all the Old Testament Portraits. 
There are few who are not familiar with the 
story of Joseph. Even those who know little 
of the Bible—to whom Abraham, Isaac, and 
Jacob are mere names, and the less prominent 
figures not even so much, can tell you all about 
Joseph. Why is this? Is it because the story 
of Joseph is painted in more vivid colours than 
any of the other narratives? It is not so 
painted. It is less graphic in its delineation 
than the portraiture of the Garden of Eden; 
it is less sublime than the description of the 
Flood; it is less poetic than the vision of Bethel 
or the scene of Peniel. Yet neither the Garden 


of Eden nor the slopes of Ararat, neithez the 
i74 


JOSEPH THE OPTIMIST 175 


plain of Bethel nor the heights of Peniel, 
have yielded so many flowers to fancy as the 
ground trodden by the feet of Joseph. Or is it 
because Joseph is a greater character than his 
predecessors and successors? He is not 
greater. He never reaches the sacrificial 
heights of Abraham nor the sacrificial depths 
of Isaac. Like Moses, he is in Egypt; but he 
is mot, like Moses, a maker of history. It is 
difficult to see how his brilliant government 
contributed anything to the Exodus or in- 
fluenced in any respect the fortunes of Egypt 
herself. Neither the personality nor the public 
position of Joseph accounts for his. effect on 
posterity. How is that effect to be ex- 
plained ? 

If I were allowed to express the answer in 
childlike language, I would say that the cause 
of the narrative’s attractiveness is that the 
story has a good end. What I mean is, not 
only that it culminates in brightness, but that 
the brightness is found to have been produced 
by the actual clouds of the narrative. This is, 
I think, a point in which the Portrait of Joseph 


176 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


is unique amongst Old Testament figures, 
You will find any number of narratives that 
wind up with the prosperity of their heroes; 
but I cannot at present recall another in which 
the trial is found to be a part of the prosperity. 
Noah emerges from the flood into the sun- 
shine; but the flood remains a calamity still. 
Daniel is saved from the lions; but he is saved 
by the allaying of their fury. Job gets back 
his possessions; but he gets them back as a 
reversal of his adverse circumstances, not as 
a result of these circumstances. The case of 
Joseph is very different. His peculiarity is not 
that he rises to a pinnacle of earthly splendour ; 
most of the Old Testament figures do that. 
It is that his splendour has come out of his 
dungeon. Weare made to see, to feel, that he 
would never have been on the pinnacle at all 
if it had not been for his misfortunes in the 
valley, that his sunshine has come from his 
suffering, that the avenue of shade has led him 
to the palace of light. 

I have said that this is a unique experience 
in the Old Testament; but it is the universal 


JOSEPH THE OPTIMIST 177 


experience in the New. The New Testament 
is nearer to the view of suffering expressed in 
the Portrait of Joseph than to any other theory 
whatever. The doctrine of the Gospel is, not 
simply that after dark the light comes, but 
that the garment which at night we call dark 
is that which in the morning we pronounce 
luminous. The words of the latest Evangelist 
are, ‘ Your sorrow shall be ¢urned into joy.’ It 
is the transformation of sorrow rather than 
the abolition of sorrow that is contemplated. 
The watchword of Christianity is ‘perfect 
through suffering.’ The glory of Christ is not 
something which He reaches as a compensa- 
tion for the cross; it is the lifting up of the 
cross itself. It has become a simple matter of 
history that Christ has triumphed by the very 
steps which were taken to defeat Him. He 
has not been lifted out of the valley; it is the 
valley itself that has been exalted. He has 
not been freed from service; it is service itself 
that has ceased to be ignominious. He has 
not been exempted from further stooping; 
He has been exempted from hindrances to 
M 


178 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


further stooping. His sorrow has been ‘turned 
into joy.’ 

Now, I say that the nearest analogy which 
the Old Testament presents to this standpoint 
is the Portrait of Joseph. Even the Book of 
Job does not reach the summit of the hill. 
That book does not attain the ighest 
optimism—even in its climax. It shows us a 
good man rewarded for his patience in trial. 
That is satisfactory, but it is not purely opti- 
mistic; the trial still remains as so much lost 
time. Ifa man has been interrupted in a race, 
it does not reinstate him to set him on the road 
once more. He has lost ground in the interval ; 
his competitors are on before him; the re- 
newal of his original power may never again 
secure his original object. But if you could 
tell the man that the interruption came to him 
when he was on the wrong road, if you could 
tell him that he tripped just when he was 
about to take the false turning, a turning which 
has led his competitors astray, the matter 
would assume a very different aspect. He 
would then regard his interruption as itself his 


JOSEPH THE OPTIMIST 179 


greatest stroke of good fortune; his fetter 
would be found to be his wing. Pure optimism 
is not the belief that all will come right; it 
is the belief that all is right mow, that 
nothing has ever been wrong. It is not simply 
the contemplation of an ultimate abundance ; 
it is the wreathing with glory of times of 
scarcity. It is the exaltation of trial itself 
into the position of a step in the great ladder 
by which Man ascends to the summit of his 
nature. Now, this is the optimism which is 
reached in the story of Joseph. It is an 
alternation of lights and shadows; but in the 
shadows, as in the lights, the man equally 
moves upward. The tragedy and the triumph 
alike minister to his progress, alike conspire 
to make him the benefactor of his kind. It is 
not that he is lifted into the sunlight; his 
crosses are lifted into the sunlight. He 
succeeds by reason of his seeming failure. 
His thorn of yesterday becomes his flower of 
to-day ; his strength is perfected in weakness. 

The truth is, the Portrait of Joseph is to 
my mind a philosophical picture—the earliest 


180 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


attempt to delineate a theory of the universe 
in the form of a narrative. I do not mean 
that it had not its basis in fact. I mean that 
here, for the first time, there was an eye to 
observe the fact. The man who narrated this 
life is more than a recorder; he is a theorist. 
He has not only exhibited the materials; he 
has woven them together. What he has in 
his mind is really an essay or sermon. If he 
had entitled it ‘An Inquiry into the Causes 
of Human Suffering,’ he could not have more 
clearly revealed his intention. That intention 
is to vindicate by experience the ways of God 
to Man. Instead of vindicating by an argu- 
ment, he selects a life—a life which shall run 
from youth to age, and be the normal type of 
all lives. And I am bound to say that in this 
delineation he has passed quite beyond his 
time, beyond his race. He has claimed a 
larger empire for God than his countrymen 
claimed for Him. None of his countrymen, 
so far as I know—not even the author of the 
Book of Job—recognised suffering as a part of 


the mosaic; it is always either a penalty or a 


JOSEPH THE OPTIMIST 181 


trial. Here it is a fragment of the building— 
a necessary fragment, a contribution to that 
great temple whose completion is to perfect 
the praise of God. Joseph himself is made 
the spokesman of the new evangel. He comes 
before us as the advocate for optimism. He 
confronts the facts of his own life, and claims 
absolute good fortune. He does not say that 
the joy has exceeded the sorrow. He does not 
say that on the whole the lights have out- 
weighed the shadows. He denies the shadows. 
He refuses to admit the rea/zty of the clouds. 
He claims his adversaries as his unconscious 
friends, ‘As for you, ye thought evil against 
me; but God meant it for good,’ 

Let us look at the philosophy of this life of 
Joseph. Those who are conversant with music 
tell us that each of Chopin’s Preludes has three 
parts, which embody a distinct sequence. In 
the first, the melody is free and unrestrained. 
In the second, it seems to move through 
tangled places—to be impeded in its way by 
the intervention of resisting elements. But in 


the third, the melody comes out into the open 


182 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


once more; the tangles vanish, the impedi- 
ments are removed, and the notes of the first 
part reappear in a new connection and with 
a fresh power. Now, this is precisely the 
music which I find in the life of Joseph. 
He is one of Chopin’s Preludes. He has his 
three periods. He has his period of youthful 
freedom, when his life flies through the open 
with wings of fire. Then comes a seeming 
closure. He is no longer in the outer air. He 
is shut within a tunnel; he is to all appearance 
debarred from progress, evermore. All at once 
he makes a discovery. The tunnel has been 
itself a progress. He has been moving 
underground all the time he thought himself 
stranded—has been moving by a shorter way. 
The dark road has been the quicker road. 
The notes of the morning are repeated 
in the afternoon; but they are sung on a 
higher hill and under a purer sky. Come, and 
let us traverse these three parts of the Prelude 
—the notes of the morning, the notes over- 
shadowed, the shadows themselves merging 
into the symphony! We shall find in it the 


JOSEPH THE OPTIMIST 183 


earliest effort of the Hebrew race to transcend 
itself, its first deliberate attempt to break 
away from its own theories, and to seek a 
humanitarian basis for the action of God. 

The drama opens with the picture of a 
petted boy—a child of his father’s old age. 
He has two qualities by heredity, and one by 
education. From his grandfather Abraham 
he has received the spirit of optimism; and 
that is good. From his father Jacob he has 
received the spirit of ambition; and that is 
also good. But from his mode of education 
he has received the spirit of selfishness; and 
that vitiates everything. He is an optimist 
for his world; but his world unfortunately 
contains only one person—this little boy 
himself. He has too wide a horizon, too 
unobstructed a view. No interest has been 
allowed to clash with zs interest. His father’s 
will has been 4zs will. Brothers have been dis- 
counted ; he has been the favoured child. He 
is eager to preserve his pre-eminence. He feeds 
the flame of his father’s partiality; he tells 
everything that can disparage his brothers. And 


184 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


because he ‘thinks of their disparagement, he 
dreams of their disparagement. The wishes of 
his night repeat the wishes of his day. He is 
always seeing Azs star overtopping the other 
stars, his sheaf outgrowing the other sheaves. 
That the streets of London are to be paved 
with gold is a small thing; but the bells 
are ringing out that he is to be Lord Mayor 
of the golden city—and that makes its pro- 
sperity worth a hymn of praise. Joseph’s 
world has as yet but one inhabitant—him- 
self. 

Now, what is wrong here? He needs to get 
his mind widened, you say. Not at all; he 
needs to get his mind narrowed. He has too 
many gates open in /2fe, and therefore he has 
too few gates open in sympathy. The in- 
firmity of this boy Joseph is just his want of 
encumbrances. He has never met with a shut 
door, never encountered an opposing wall, 
never had to ask for anything twice. There 
has not been cultivated in him the spirit of 
prayer—the spirit of need ; and therefore there 
has not been cultivated in him the spirit of 


JOSEPH THE OPTIMIST 185 


sympathy. All inward widening is produced 
by outward narrowing. How shall I pass 
from the life of the egotist to the life of the 
humanitarian? Only through my own strait 
gate. The wing by which I fly to your trouble 
is the wing which is wounded; the hand by 
which I help you is the hand which is maimed. 
In vain shall I enter your desert till I have 
tasted the waters of Marah. Not by fearless 
running shall I overtake and lift your burden, 
but by halting on my own thigh. The educa- 
tion in sympathy is the experience of personal 
bruises; of every true comforter we can say, 
‘By his stripes we are healed.’ 

And so, Joseph must have the second part 
of the Prelude—the period of enclosure. It 
comes; and, lo, the gates which were all open 
are all shut! The boy had run in the free air 
of heaven; the youth is cribbed, cabined, and 
confined. The hours of morning had owned 
no master; the noonday is one perpetual, one 
enforced service. His prospect in life is seem- 
ingly blotted out. He is stolen from home. 
He is proclaimed to be dead. He is sold asa 


£86 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


slave to a band of Ishmaelites. He is trans- 
ferred by them to an Egyptian soldier. He is 
suspected innocently of grave offences. He is 
immured ina dungeon. Time and space seem 
to have ended for him. In his own land he is 
already numbered among the dead; in this 
foreign land he-is w#znumbered either among 
dead or living—he is a cypher. He might be 
painted at this moment with his foot resting 
upon his own grave, 

And, all the time, beneath that grave there 
is a gold-mine. Never in all his life has 
Joseph been so near to glory—moral and 
physical glory. For the first time in his 
existence he puts out his hand to help an- 
other; and accidentally it touches the gold- 
mine. Having no longer a dream of his own 
to interpret, he begins to interpret the dreams 
of his fellow-prisoners. He reveals his poetic 
genius as he never has revealed it before, just 
because he is not listening to his own singing; 
and he reveals it to some purpose. Little did 
he imagine when he entered that dungeon 
that he was to have such an audience! One 


JOSEPH THE OPTIMIST 187 


of his fellow-prisoners is, in three days, to be 
in touch with royalty—in touch with a royal 
personage who wants, beyond all things, an 
interpreter of dreams. Joseph might have 
ranged the plains of his native Mesopotamia 
in wild freedom for a hundred years and never 
have found such a chance of promotion as came 
to him within the precincts of that gloomy and 
stifling dungeon. 

Then comes the third part of the Prelude. 
We are in a new scene—the court of Pharaoh; 
Joseph stands beside the throne. The boy 
of the desert, the youth of the dungeon, has 
become the adviser of royalty. Yet, strangely 
do the notes of the first part blend with those 
of the third! Mesopotamia has come over 
into Egypt! The enemies of his boyhood are 
there—those brothers whom he had wronged, 
and who had wronged him! His aged father 
is there—that father who had believed him to 
be dead! The old patriarchal life is there, 
like a song of home in a strange land! But 
they are all changed—they are all more worth 
having. The father has given up his unjust 


188 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


partiality ; Joseph no longer needs his special 
care. The brothers have given up their 
jealousy; the Prime Minister of Egypt is 
beyond their jealousy. /oseph has given up 
his selfishness; his dreams are now humani- 
tarian. The relieving of the pain of others led 
him at first to a gold-mine, and, ever since, it 
has become a joy for its own sake. And, 
remember, all this reunion, all this better 
union, has come from a dark cloud. What is 
it that has joined the hands of Joseph and his 
brethren? It is famine. They have fled to 
Egypt for corn; they have heard of the great 
economist who administers there. They dream 
not it is their brother. They are flying in 
panic from to-day, and they meet their yester- 
day. They are driven by fear, and they fall 
into the arms of hope. They come to beg of 
a stranger, and they find themselves féted by 
a brother, 

There is only one feature of this Portrait 
which has been alleged to be an artistic 
blemish—a blemish in its picture of optimism, 
It has been said, Why did Joseph let his father 


JOSEPH THE OPTIMIST 189 


believe him to be dead for so many years? 
We are asked, Could you imagine a high- 
souled young man, living within a reasonable 
distance from the place of his birth, and aware 
that his father was still residing in his old 
home—yet keeping his existence for years 
concealed from that father, and allowing the 
paternal heart to count him among the dead! 
I heard one of the most eloquent of preachers 
the other day, in strong detraction from the 
character of Joseph, put this side of the case 
with great force and with great ability. ‘What 
do you think of that!’ I said afterwards to 
one of the audience. ‘Oh,’ was the reply, ‘he 
ought to remember that it was the fault of the 
dramatist \’ 

I must confess that I do not regard this 
answer as Satisfactory. What we want to 
know is, why such an otherwise admirable 
Picture should apparently contain such a flaw. 
It is beside the question to discuss whether 
that flaw lay in the life or in its delineator. In 
either case the problem to be solved is on the 
canvas. The seeming blemish is now part of 


Igo THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


the Picture, and there lies the sting. The 
Picture is, otherwise, beautiful. It describes 
the development of a life from selfishness to 
unselfishness. If it has recorded an act of heart- 
lessness at the climax, it has failed in portray- 
ing its own plan. But has it? What if this 
so-called act of heartlessness is in reality an 
act of Aeart? What if the seeming blemish is 
a colour of new beauty? What if the apparent 
flaw is an added flower? Iam convinced that 
itis. This act of Joseph is no neglect either 
on his part or on the part of the dramatist. 
It is a designed silence—a pause in the music 
which is meant to give effect to the music. It 
is no sign of crudeness either in the man or in 
his biographer ; it is the mark of ripe develop- 
ment, of autumn fulness. 

For consider, had not Joseph’s life in youth 
been a thorn to his father—the greatest moral 
thorn of his father’s old age! Had not the 
life of this son been the one rock on which 
Jacob’s ship had been in danger of foundering! 
Had not his partiality for Joseph been the 
bane to family union, the barrier to the pro- 


JOSEPH THE OPTIMIST 191 


gress of the kingdom of God! Had it not 
threatened to hasten the severance of the 
twelve tribes of Israel! Had not the fancied 
death of Joseph been a great d00n to his 
father! It had brought family peace. It had 
secured unity around the hearth. It had 
broken a régime of manifest injustice. Was 
it not well that the delusion should be pre- 
served! Was it not best that for the present 
the old man should be allowed still to think 
that his son was dead! Did not Joseph him- 
self owe this as an atonement to his brethren! 
Had not he too been unjust, selfish, monopolis- 
ing, eager to grasp more than his share! How 
could he better make reparation than by effacing 
himself, allowing his name to be blotted out 
from the living members of that circle whose 
harmony he had done so much to disturb, and 
whose unity he had helped to destroy! 

I hold, then, that this seemingly dark side is 
a part of the bright mosaic, a contribution to 
the artist’s conception that all things work 
together for good. I cannot detect a single 
feature in the Portrait of Joseph which has 


192 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


not been placed there for the express purpose 
of advocating the cause of optimism. Even 
the closing scene of all, the hour of his death, 
is grandly consistent with the ideal of the 
Picture. Why is it that the writer to the 
Hebrews, that great spectator of the Great 
Gallery, has fixed upon this final hour of 
Joseph as the typical hour of his life? ‘By 
faith Joseph, when he was dying, made mention 
of the departing of the children of Israel, and 
gave commandment concerning his bones.’ 
One would have thought the life was rich 
enough in incidents to make it unnecessary to 
draw illustrations from its close. Why not say 
that the optimistic faith of Joseph appeared in 
the dreams of his boyhood, or in the courage 
of his youth, or in the beneficence of his man- 
hood! Why not go back to the sanguineness 
on the Mesopotamian plains or the fortitude 
in the Egyptian dungeon! Why select the 
example from the hour which least distin- 
guishes one life from another—the period of 
the dark valley! It is because, to be opti- 
mistic in that valley is optimism indeed, 


JOSEPH THE OPTIMIST 193 


because the man who can ¢here keep the 
light in his soul has proved that his faith is 
supreme. And is there any optimism like that 
of Joseph’s closing hour! Was it not a bold 
thing to believe that Israel would come out of 
Egypt! Was it not a daring thing to dream 
that this little band would not be absorbed in 
the Egyptian waves, but would issue forth as 
an independent river! Was it not a brave 
thing to hope that this insignificant clan 
would keep its nationality and its name amid 
the rush and roar of waters! Nay, is not this 
still the crowning marvel of Israel! Blended 
with every land, deprived of local habitation, 
denuded of temple and sacrifice, denied a 
voice among the nations, refused a place in the 
political arena of the world, this people holds 
fast its hope and will not let it go. And its 
hope is the faith of the dying Joseph—the 
faith that Egypt will not absorb it, that culture 
will not outgrow it, that modern life will not 
supplant it, that in the days to come it will 


resume its reign. 


194 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


ORD, teach me the power of life’s seem- 

ing arrests! Often have I felt the 

grief of Joseph. Often have the bright dreams 
of youth appeared to fade, and the shadows 
of the prison-house to close over the growing 
man. I have cried in the bitterness of my 
soul, ‘The promise of the morning is broken; 
I shall never mow find the treasure for which 
I have sought so long!’ And lo, I have found 
it zz the prison-house, zz the dungeon, in a 
panel of the locked door! I had sought it in 
all likely places—in the fields, in the woods, in 
the homes of the rich and mighty; and it has 
come to me in the one spot where its presence 
seemed impossible. Thou hast answered me 
as Thou answeredst Job—‘out of the whirl- 
wind. I had been looking to all calm places 
for an answer. I had looked to the gentle 
dawn; I had gazed on the roieate morning; 
I had stood in the pensive twilight; I had 
communed with the still and starry night; I 
had listened upon my bed when the pulse of 
life beat low. From none of these did my 
answer come: Then the whirlwind swept by, 


JOSEPH THE OPTIMIST 195 


and I said, ‘There will be Divine silence xow ; 
I cannot hope for Thy voice any more!’ And 
behold, it was from the whirlwind that Thy 
voice came! What earth’s silence could not 
give, what earth’s calmness could not give, 
what earth’s zephyrs could not give, was 
given by the storm! Let me never again fear 
the shut gate; let me never more dread the 
interrupted journey! Teach me that my 
Calvary may be my crown! Tell me that 
my Patmos may be my promotion! Show 
me that my Damascus darkness may be my 
dazzling daylight! Reveal to me that there 
may be progress through life’s pauses, voices 
in life’s valley, symmetry in life’s sighs, music 
in life’s maladies, beauty in life’s burdens, work 
in life’s wilderness! Then shall I know why 
this Portrait has been placed in the Great 
Gallery of deathless souls. 


CHAPTER X 
MOSES THE PRACTICAL 


AS we pass from the Portrait of Joseph to the 
Portrait of Moses, we make the transition toa 
new phase of Semitic life. All the foregoing 
ficures are those of idealists. They are all 
seeking something beyond the actual, some- 
thing that would abolish the present order of 
things. Young Adam wants a transference 
of the Eden government, a transference which 
would make him lord of the whole Garden. 
Abel wants a form of sacrifice altogether in 
advance of his age. Enoch is aiming after a 
life which can only be realised in heaven. 
Noah is seeking a reform which must involve 
a renovation of the earth. Abraham is trying 
to establish in the world a kingdom of Divine 
righteousness. Jacob is in search of a ladder 


between earth and heaven. Joseph is the 
196 


MOSES THE PRACTICAL 197 


representative of youth’s romantic dreams. 
They are all men of the future—men who seek 
the stones for their temple from scenes and 
circumstances not present to the eye. But, 
with the Portrait of Moses, we enter another 
world—the real world. Here for the first time 
we are confronted by a man who proposes to 
build the temple with the actual stones of the 
quarry. He says to his countrymen, ‘You 
have been looking too far away to find the 
material for your Tower of Babel; this com- 
mandment is not in heaven, neither is it beyond 
the sea; but the word is very nigh unto thee, 
in thy mouth, and in thy heart.’ 

Here is the advent of a new régime. Man 
has begun to contemplate the possibility of a 
palace which shall be reared out of earthly 
elements, a palace which shall rise from the 
daily work of ordinary human souls. Salva- 
tion by obedience to law, salvation by the 
performance of the hourly duty and the fulfil- 
ment of the habitual task, salvation by the 
adequate discharge of the common round of 
earth’s requirements for the labouring man— 


1988 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


that was the goal which glittered before the 
eyes of Moses. It is in the pursuit of this 
goal that Moses is distinguished from all his 
predecessors. His name has been associated 
with many things. It has been associated with 
the building of the tabernacle. It has been 
linked with the origin of the Jewish ritual. 
It has been connected with the deliverance 
from Egypt. It has been intertwined with the 
life of the desert. It has been identified with 
the discovery of the Promised Land. But 
none of these things is dzstznctzve of Moses. 
You will find each of them foreshadowed in 
the previous figures. You will find an earlier 
tabernacle in Eden. You will see an earlier 
ritual in Abel. You will behold an anticipa- 
tion of a promised land in Enoch. You 
will meet faith sustained amid a desert in 
Abraham. You will witness the provision for 
an Egyptian deliverance in the closing act of 
Joseph. But there is one sphere in which 
Moses stands alone, in which he is the first 
founder, the primitive inaugurator. It is in the 


discovery that common life may be religious 


MOSES THE PRACTICAL 199 


life. That God was in the Garden, men knew; 
that God was in the sanctuary, men knew; that 
God was beside the altar, men knew. But 
that God should be in secular places, that the 
home should be itself a sanctuary, that the 
household fire should be an altar fire, that 
the honouring of a human parent should be 
deemed an act of piety, that the observance of 
a neighbour’s rights should be esteemed one 
of the rites of worship—this was a new depar- 
ture in the religious life of Man! 

To Moses belongs the inauguration of this 
development. Our first impression is that the 
task set before him was a very easy one. It 
seems a simple thing to teach the common 
duties of life. If it were a creed that had to be 
taught, if it were a system of philosophy, or 
even an order of worship, we could appreciate 
the need for a great founder; but the most 
ordinary mind would seem adequate to the task 
of saying, ‘ All the duties of your life are to be 
counted religious duties,” Yet in truth this 
impression is entirely wrong. It was simply 


the most difficult thing in the world for a man 


200 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


of that time to reach such a conclusion. It 
has not been particularly easy in any age. 
Religion has ever tended to present itself to 
the mind as the antithesis to the world. Grace 
has ever appeared as the opposite of nature, 
faith as the antagonist of sight. What St. 
James pronounces a completed development 
of the religious life—the visiting of the widows 
and the fatherless—would still be regarded by 
many as only an incipient Christianity. So 
foreign to the natural mind is the Mosaic 
idea, that men in all ages have required to 
grow into it. Moses required to grow into 
it. Did it ever strike you that, of all the 
lives depicted in the Gallery, he is the most 
tardy in entering on his mission. All the 
previous figures of the Gallery accept their 
vocation the moment it is presented to them. 
Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, move at 
once toward the beckoning light; even Jacob 
does, though his old nature struggles within 
him. But Moses holds back. He is long 
in accepting, slow in obeying, late in achiev- 


ing. Do you think this is an accident 


MOSES THE PRACTICAL 201 


in the Portrait of the Great Gallery! It is 
one of its most designed features, The 
painter of this figure knew that the sphere 
selected for it was not a natural sphere. 
Therefore he describes Moses, not as rushing 
into it, but as creeping into it. Let us follow 
the pencil of this inspired artist. He has re- 
vealed to us that process of development by 
which a man learns the religious value of 
practical morality. Let us stand in the Great 
Gallery and observe that process. Let us 
trace it; let us expound it; let us apply it to 
our daily lives. 

There are four periods in the education of 
Moses—four stages through which he climbed 
into the place prepared for him. The first 
might be called his period of unconsciousness 
—the time when he was not a moral giver, but 
a moral recipient. We a// begin with such 
a period. Our first lessons in morality are 
derived, not from the good we do, but from 
the good we receive. I am deeply impressed 
with the truth of this principle in human 
experience. Ido not think we get our earliest 


202 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


notions of morality from active service, but 
from passive recipiency. Where did you first 
learn the beauty of justice? Was it from 
doing a just action? No; it was from having 
a just action done to you. Where did you 
first learn the charm of sympathy? Was it 
from condoling with another’s distress? No; 
it was from being condoled with by another in 
your distress. Our original moral lessons do 
not come to us in the form of lessons, but in 
the form of benefits—kindness received, gifts 
bestowed, dangers averted, penalties remitted. 
It was these that wakened within us the im- 
pulse of generosity. It was these that stirred 
within us the sense of beneficence. It was 
these that set before us the ideals of chivalry. 
It was these that roused in our hearts the love 
of mercy. The recognition of the law of con- 
science was in the beginning an unconscious 
recognition ; it was produced by favours 
received. 

Now, this was the first stage of the moral 
training of Moses. In early days he was 
merely a recipient. He was more indebted to 


MOSES THE PRACTICAL 203 


the goodness of others than was any man in 
the Gallery. The writer to the Hebrews 
naively says, ‘By faith Moses was hid three 
months.’ No doubt; but by the faith of 
whom? Not of Moses himself, but of kind 
friends who wanted to give him a chance in 
life. The civilisation of the day had deter- 
mined to give him ~o chance. It looked upon 
his infancy and said, ‘This is one of the 
children unfit to live; let him die; let him 
make room for other and stronger lives!’ And 
so, the culture of Egypt rejected the child 
Moses, cast him out to perish in the waters of 
the Nile. He was found by the hands of 
philanthropy; he was rescued by human com- 
passion. Hecomes before us as a foundling, 
a child of charity. He is the first of that 
great company of waifs and strays whom 
human benevolence has gathered into the fold. 
He is cast upon the waters as one unfit to 
survive ; he is rescued by way of experiment. 
Human charity gives him a chance—a chance 
to show his power of survival. He is taken 


up by royal hands, Egyptian hands. He is 


204 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


planted in an Egyptian environment; he is 
trained in the culture of the Pharaohs; he is 
withdrawn from all the associations of his own 
people. Everything is done to make him 
forget—forget his Hebrew origin, forget the 
traditions of his race. He is educated in 
Egypt’s wisdom, nursed in Egypt’s ritual, 
stimulated by Egypt’s promises. If he will 
give his life to Egypt, the ball of fortune is 
already at his feet; he may, if he will, become 
the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. 

Meantime, by that same Egypt his own 
people are being oppressed, enslaved. Every 
form of injustice is being practised upon them 
—extortion, violence, insult, treachery, con- 
tempt, scorn. The eye of young Moses sees 
that injustice. How has he come to see it? 
Simply by his own experience of the contrary. 
By her very kindness to himself, Egypt has 
taught him her wwzkindness to his countrymen. 
She has put into his hands the mirror by which 
he sees and condemns her. And so, the first 
period closes and the second period begins. 
When next the scene opens, Moses is a young 


MOSES THE PRACTICAL 205 


man. He stands on the brow of life’s hill. 
There has come to him that period which 
comes to every man—the hour when he is 
called to make his choice between two roads 
in life. The writer to the Hebrews does not 
scruple to say that the choice presented to 
Moses was identical with the choice presented 
to Christ, ‘By faith Moses, when he was come 
to years, refused to be called the son of Phar- 
aoh’s daughter, esteeming the reproach of Christ 
greater riches than the treasures in Egypt.’ 
And is he not right! Was not the choice 
of Christ in the wilderness precisely the choice 
of Moses! The tempter said to the Son of 
Man, ‘ Which of the two will you have—royalty 
or rags?’ He offered Him on the one hand 
the kingdoms of the world and the glory of 
them, on the other a life of privation for the 
good of humanity. The reproach of Christ 
was that He chose the latter. He lost favour 
in the eyes of men, because He preferred the 
life of humanitarian sacrifice to the life of 
gilded splendour. Even such was the choice 
of Moses. He selected that alternative which 


206 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


was afterwards Christ’s reproach. Two des- 
tinies lay before him—to be the son ot 
Pharaoh’s daughter or to be a son of despised 
Israel—to bask in the sunshine of Egypt or to 
share the obloquy of the Hebrew race, Which 
should he take—the glitter or the gloom? 
Should he ascend into a position of worldly 
glory, or should he go down into a life of 
virtuous obscurity? It is a moment of crisis 
—that crisis which marks the transition from 
youth to manhood. Presently, his decision is 
made; he has chosen. He will godown. He 
will take the lot of his people. He will forego 
his bright prospects, forego the glitter and the 
gold. He descends into the valley; and the 
world laughs loud and long. The hearing of 
that laugh is the bitterest part of the pain; it 
is the message of Egypt’s reproach. ‘What 
matter!’ says the writer to the Hebrews, ‘a 
greater than Moses is to bear the same re- 
proach in the days to come; he may well 
endure a ridicule which has placed him on the 
path of the Son of Man!’ 


Here closes the second period. [It is the 


MOSES THE PRACTICAL 207 


period in which he abjures the world and with- 
draws from its temptations. Is it, then, the 
completion of his training? No; there is 
still a great gulf fixed between him and his 
goal. To abjure evil is much, but it is not 
all. Itis only half of the process—the ascetic 
half. The task for which Moses was training 
was humanitarianism—the taking up of the 
burdens of Man. That which was required of 
him was no mere abjuration of the world; it 
was a reforming of the world. It was not 
simply a refusal to join in the oppression of his 
people ; it was the effort to lift that oppression. 
Accordingly, when the third period of Moses 
opens, the impression we receive is one of 
disappointment. The youth has become a 
middle-aged man; the courtier of Egypt has 
become a shepherd in Midian. The ardour of 
his choice has not been supplemented by ardour 
of deed. Its only result has been asceticism. 
He has fled from the scene where his people 
were oppressed, but he has done nothing to 
relieve the oppression. He has been seemingly 
wasting his time. It would have been a real 


208 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


waste of time in any other sphere; but in the 
sphere of morality the example of Moses is 
to become a precedent. I am struck by the 
fact that between the age of moral choice and 
the period of outward action the Bible loves 
to interpose a time of rest. The Child-Jesus 
sees His mission at the age of twelve, but only 
enters upon it at the age of thirty. The man 
of Tarsus beholds a light from heaven and is 
eager at once to follow it; but he is sent for 
three years to ponder in the solitudes of 
Arabia, There is a time in moral history 
when a voice says to every man, ‘Come up 
into this desert place, and rest a while!’ It 
would seem as if the morning were not the 
test of a man, as if the hour of excitement 
were not the hour of surest promise. The 
Divine Voice says: ‘Go, and think over it. 
Do not yield at once to the impulse of the 
morning. Try how long it will survive. Test 
it by the circling of the hours. See if it will 
outlast the season of excitement. You can 
march to battle at the sound of trumpet and 
the beat of drum; can you be resolute for the 


MOSES THE PRACTICAL 209 


struggle when there are no accompaniments of 
glory! Only ¢hen can you say that you have 
received your call.’ 

That is the meaning of a saying which is 
applied to Moses during this third period, 
‘He endured as seeing Him who is invisible.’ 
It means that Moses kept his humanitarian 
impulse in the absence of human motives—kept 
it spite of silence and solitude, kept it when 
the sands of life were low. He had never 
ceased to hear that suppressed cry which from 
the days of his youth had sounded through the 
land of bondage—the cry of that enslaved 
Israel whose blood was his own. And now 
the probation is over, and the call comes. 
The fourth period opens. The scene is the 
desert of Horeb where Moses has gone to 
tend his flocks. It is a day of sweltering 
heat ; the bushes seem on fire. The shepherd 
is weary—weary from the burden of the sun, 
weary from the burden at his heart. He lies 
down to rest. He fixes his eye on one of the 
seared and flaming bushes—a stability favour- 
able to slumber. In that attitude he falls 

O 


210 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


asleep. Hedreams. His dream is half from 
nature, half from God. God speaks to him 
through the environment he had _ himself 
chosen. He had fixed his waking eye on one 
flaming bush. That one bush remained in his 
dream. It seemed to burn perpetually, yet 
inconsumably. Then, from the midst of it, 
there came a voice—the voice of the Lord. 
And what it said was virtually this: ‘ Moses, 
itis /that am burning. It is I that amon fire 
with the pain of humanity. It is I that am 
scorched with the heat of man’s day. It is 
time now you came to help Me. You have 
lived long enough in the sentiment, it is time 
you began toact. You have had the righteous- 
ness to abandon Egypt; but there awaits you 
a deeper righteousness. You must go back to 
Egypt once more—to bring out My treasures. 
You have pitied the burning bush; you must 
become part of that bush. You have refused 
to conform to the fashion of Egypt; you must 
consent to lead the humanitarian band.’ 

For, be it observed that the call of Moses is 
a call to humanitarianism. There is nothing 


MOSES THE PRACTICAL 21% 


local about it, nothing national. He is not 
sent simply to break the bonds of a people. 
His ultimate mission is to gzve them bonds— 
bonds of a new kind—the bonds of human 
brotherhood. He is sent to put them under 
law in a region where before they were lawless. 
He is to bind each man by the rights of his 
brother—by the claims of justice, by the ties 
of sympathy, by the instincts of the heart. He 
is to introduce a restraining force, a force 
which will say, ‘Thou shalt not.’ Not the 
liberation from Egypt, but the binding of 
Mount Sinai, is the supreme object cf the 
mission of Moses. He is wakened into 
humanitarianism that he may lead his country- 
men into the service of Man. 

For, remember that the law of Mount Sinai 
isa humanitarian law. It is not local, it is not 
temporal; itishuman. When Moses ascended 
the mount to commune with God, he ascended 
‘above all principalities and powers. He 
went up to receive a law which was to be 
distinctive of no nation—which was to be 
neither Jewish nor Egyptian nor Greek nor 


212 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


Roman nor English, but the property of the 
whole world—of man as Man. And when he 
came down from the mount, it was such a law 
he drought with him—a law which broke 
the boundaries of separate lands, which rested 
the obligations of morality on things which 
were universal, which proclaimed the sacred- 
ness of the family and the value of life and the 
rights of personal possession and the solemnity 
of man’s word to man. And why was Moses 
thus successful in the framing of a universal 
law? I have no hesitation in saying it was 
because he had felt the needs of the lowest. 
The needs of men at the foot of the ladder are 
the needs of man universal. If Moses had 
only been trained in the wants of Egyft, he 
would only have been the lawgiver for the upper 
classes, for the men who possessed ‘the 
treasures.’ But when he was trained in the 
wants of the slave population, when he was 
confronted by the bush of life as it burned 
in the valley, he met with the wants of 
humanity itself. The sorrows of the valley are 
cosmopolitan sorrows—they will be found on 


MOSES THE PRACTICAL 213 


plain and mountain too. There are wants on 
plain and mountain that do not reach the vale; 
but the wants of the vale ascend to plain and 
mountain. He who has felt the fire of the 
bush in Midian is able to legislate for the 
world, 

I believe the cosmopolitan character of the 
work of Moses is the thought which dominates 
the final scene with which the Great Gallery 
associates his name. That final scene is 
painted with dramatic boldness; Moses is 
buried in an unknown sepulchre by the hand 
of God alone. What is symbolised in the 
burial by the hand of God we need not 
inquire. Perhaps it is a metaphorical way of 
saying that he was buried by Nature, not by 
Man. Did he ascend the heights of Pisgah as 
an explorer of the Promised Land? Was he 
smitten on the summit by the winter cold; 
and did he, in returning, leave his body 
wrapped in wreaths of snow? We cannot tell. 
But, one thing is clear, In the thought of the 
artist, in the thought of the Great Gallery, 
the hiding of his burial-place is a designed 


214 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


thing. Whence this concealment? Lest his 
countrymen should reverence him too much? 
I think the meaning of the artist is the 
contrary. It was lest his countrymen should 
reverence him too little, should localise him, 
should say, ‘He is one of ours.’ In the con- 
cealment of the body of Moses the Divine 
Voice is represented as proclaiming: ‘I do 
not want this to be a local man. I do not 
want him to be the man of a class or party. I 
do not want men to say that he is a Hebrew 
teacher, a Syrian teacher, an Egyptian teacher. 
I want him to belong to the wor/d—in the 
length of it, in the breadth of it. I would 
have him claimed by no nation; I would have 
him associated with no soil ; I would have him 
known as the property of Man.’ 

And has not Moses fulfilled that destiny! 
Has the first voice of Sinai ever lost its cosmo- 
politan ring! Have its commands ever become 
merely national! ‘Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God ’—is ¢hat national; is it not the voice 
to humanity! ‘Thou shalt not make any 


graven image’—is that national; is it not the 


MOSES THE PRACTICAL 215 


ignoring of all physical limits! ‘Honour thy 
father and thy mother’—is that national; are 
not the ties of family universal! ‘Thou shalt 
not kill’—is that national; is not life every- 
where dear! ‘Thou shalt not steal’—is that 
national; are not possessions everywhere 
precious! ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness’ 
—is that national; have not all lands sought 
the secret of truth! Even the command to 
keep a day of rest, seemingly the most local 
of all the Decalogue precepts, is based upon no 
national observance—no Jewish holiday, no 
patriotic anniversary, no commemoration of a 
people’s triumph. It is based upon the fact 
of creation, on the constitution of Nature 
itself, on that design of the world which makes 
all things one,‘ Remember the Sabbath Day 
to keep it holy, for in six days the Lord made 
heaven and earth.’ Such universalism is grand 
—in the old world it is unique. It can only 
belong to a race which has in it the conscious- 
ness and the conscience of humanity—a race 
which feels within its veins not merely its 
native blood, but the blood of all ages and the 


216 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


heart of all climes. Such a race had a right 
to its Messianic aspirations, 


EVEAL to me, O Lord, that fire which 
burns and yet does not consume—the 

fire of love! My life will be consumed wzthout 
the burning of that fire. It is want of 
enthusiasm that kills me, wears me away. 
My soul dies through lack of burning. I never 
really live unless I catch fire. The danger of 
my bush is not its heat, but its wilderness. It 
is the commonplace that consumes me. I am 
never SO weary as when I am aimless, never so 
fatigued as when I have nothing to do. Set 
fire to my heart, O Lord! Kindle me into the 
love of humanity! Inflame me with the passion 
to make my brother glad! Give me a tele- 
pathic sense of others’ pain! Let me feel the 
sorrows of those to whom Egypt is a foreign 
land—who are not adapted to their life’s 
environment! Lay on my heart the burden of 
the bondsman, the troubles of the toiler, the 
weights of the weary! Help me to live fora 


MOSES THE PRACTICAL 217 


day, for an hour, yea, even for a moment, in 
the experience of human struggle ! Call me 
up to the burning bush where Thou dwellest, 
where Thou sufferest! Teach me that the 
burning bush is the Tree of Life in the midst 
of Thy Paradise! I speak of the fires of hell; 
teach me that there is a fire in heaven—a 
sense of sorrows not my own! Give me this 
Divine pain, Zy pain, the pain of Calvary! 
When I have overcome my selfish heart I shall 
inherit Thy Tree of Life—that burning bush 
of sacrifice which is the glory of Thy Garden. 


CHAP TE Rea 
JOSHUA THE PROSAIC 


THERE is a type of human character which 
belongs to all ages and to all nations, but 
which is absent from all mazzonal galleries. 
I allude to the type of humanity called prosaic. 
When a nation employs the hand of a painter 
to place on canvas the figures of the men she 
deems heroic, she never includes among these 
the prosaic man. She may include the man 
immersed in ordinary business ; Confucius was 
such a man—and China painted Confucius. 
But then, Confucius was a business director, 
He was not the subject of commercial and 
municipal rules; he was the maker of these 
rules; that itself removes him from prosaic 
associations. The prosaic man is the subor- 
dinate man, the man who obeys orders, It 


matters very little in what sphere these orders 
218 


JOSHUA THE PROSAIC 219 


are received. The cleaner of telescopes for 
the observations of a Galileo is not a whit 
nearer to the stars than is the carrier of parcels 
for a firm of merchandise. He, too, is but a 
carrier of parcels; he is not the inaugurator 
of his own work—he is deriving his move- 
‘ment from the impact of others. 

I have said that such a man figures in no 
national gallery. But he figures in the one 
gallery that is zo¢ national—the Gallery of the 
Bible. Here there emerges into heroic pro- 
minence that type which everywhere else has 
been esteemed the reverse of heroic—the man 
who obeys orders. We should have missed 
something if in this Gallery there had been no 
place prepared for 4zm, if the sphere of subor- 
dinate duty had been the one spot where the 
possibility of heroism was not recognised. 
Hitherto, as these successive figures have 
passed before us, we have not found a repre- 
sentative of subordinate duty. All the spheres 
we have examined have been those of Invaders 
or of such as wzsh to be leaders. Adam wants 


to rule the Garden. Abel wants an independent 


220 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


worship. Enoch and Noah want to change 
the fashion. Abraham seeks to found a state. 
Isaac labours to consolidate a household. 
Jacob aspires to establish a priesthood. Joseph 
dreams of a city of gold. Moses aims at 
universal legislation. There has been no place 
as yet for the follower, the satellite, the man 
who obeys orders. There has been no recog- 
nition of the hewers of wood and the drawers 
of water—of those whose mission is not to 
plan, but to execute, and whose action con- 
stitutes three-fourths of the conduct of life. 
But now this recognition is coming. A 
figure is about to appear which is to embody 
the desiderated idea. That figure is Joshua. 
He is from beginning to end the representative 
of the satellite, of the men who follow. As we 
pass from Moses to Joshua we feel as if we 
were passing from poetry to prose. Practical 
though Moses was, his sphere was on the height. 
The mountain was his native element. It was 
on the mountain that he had to prepare for 
the plain. It was the soul of a poet that led 
him to glorify common things; his sober 


JOSHUA THE PROSAIC 221 


practice came from his ecstatic elevation. 
Joshua, on the other hand, had never stood on 
the height, had never veguzred to occupy it. 
He had not possessed the genius to discover 
the Promised Land. He was no explorer, no 
investigator, no Columbus. His work began 
where that of Columbus ended. When “e 
entered on the scene 4zs America had been 
already found. Moses was moving toward 
the Land of Promise. Everything had been 
planned ; everything had been arranged. All 
that was needed was a patient drudge to 
execute the orders—a man who would be con- 
tent to take the servant’s place. No prophetic 
vision was required, no foresight, no insight. 
The thing wanted was rather an adsence of 
these qualities—a man who would not look 
before him, who would not look within him, 
who would simply listen for the word of 
command, and do as he was bid. The head 
and the heart of the enterprise were already 
there; all that remained was to seek a 
hand. 

Now, this place was to be filled by Joshua, 


222 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


More than any other figure of the Gallery he 
represents the working man. From first to 
last his duties were mechanical. He began 
with the post of a servant, and he ended with 
the post of a servant. He never at any time 
reaped personal credit from his achievements 
—not even when he was head of the army. 
He was always indebted to circumstances. 
The results he achieved were stupendous; 
they more directly influenced the modern 
world than did the life of Abraham or the 
prime-ministry of Joseph, for the conquest of 
Canaan issued in the creed of Christendom. 
Yet Joshua comes not before us as a pioneer. 
He appears merely as an instrument. He 
seems to be /ed into the Promised Land. He 
is rather an occasion than a cause. The 
wreaths of victory fell not on 4zm. The prize 
of glory eluded his grasp. He was ever merely 
an instrument. He is only once recorded as 
using his own judgment—when he made a 
league with Gibeon; and on that occasion 
he was overreached. He may be described 
epigrammatically as a man who madea fortune 


JOSHUA THE PROSAIC 223 


whose acquisition was ever afterwards attri- 
buted to another. He could well have reversed 
the words of a later countryman and said, 
‘7 have laboured, and other men have entered 
znto my labours—have reaped the glory of 
what I have sown.’ 

Let me now proceed to illustrate this feature 
of the Portrait of Joshua. We first meet with 
him in the battle of Rephidim. He is still a 
young man; but he has been intrusted with 
the entire command of the forces during the 
engagement. One would think that this was 
a very responsible post, and that the man who 
held it was the main factor in the battle. Not 
thus is it represented in the Great Gallery. 
Here, the real scene of battle is placed outside 
the physical combat altogether—on the top of 
a hill where Moses stands in prayer! The 
alternations of the battle do not come from 
the movements of the contending parties. 
They come from the variations of intensity 
with which the jfetztzons rise. Moses is the 
real combatant ; the prayers of Moses are the 
real weapons. Are the hands of Moses lifted 


224 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


in supplication; then Joshua is seen to triumph. 
Are the hands of Moses drooping wearily ; then 
Amalek gains ground. Does Joshua at last 
achieve the victory over Amalek ; it is not by 
might, nor power, nor skill; it is because the 
supplicating hands of Moses have been held 
up by other hands and prevented from grow- 
ing weary. The battle of Rephidim is a battle 
of will-force—the will-force of one not engaged 
in the fray. That is the Picture in the Gallery. 
Joshua fights with Amalek on the plain, and 
Amalek falls back before the sword of Joshua. 
But the real fighting power is not on the 
plain, not with the sword, not in Joshua. It is 
up on a neighbouring mountain, where an old 
man stands and prays that Joshua may win. 
It is this will-force called prayer that sways the 
battle. It is this silent thing, this voiceless 
thing, this unseen and unheard thing, that is 
the prime mover, the real mover. It is this 
that nerves the arm of Israel; it is this that 
repels the host of Amalek. Joshua might be 
nowhere. He is acypher, a mute, a pageant set 
on the way to hide the vea/ source of power. 


JOSHUA THE PROSAIC 225 


Do not imagine that this is an accidental 
trait in the delineation of the great artist. It 
is the most deliberate touch of his pencil. The 
battle of Rephidim is not merely a preliminary 
event; it isa typical event. It is a keynote, 
a prelude to the whole piece. In all the 
shifting of the scenes there is no shifting of 
the principle. Joshua may be transferred from 
the desert to the Promised Land; he may be 
raised from the business of a delegate into 
the post of a leader; he may assume the out- 
ward robe which Moses used to wear—but, 
place him where you will, clothe him as you 
will, he never ceases to be a subaltern. His work 
is ever that of a subordinate. Apparently a 
mighty conqueror, he has at no time either 
the kingdom, the power, or the glory. His 
position is that of an instrument blown by the 
wind into strains of harmony. He derives no 
credit from his own melodies. He is a passive 
agent in their formation. They come not /rom 
him; they only breathe ¢hrough him; he is 
himself the product of a higher will. 

He stands before the walls of Jericho, His 

x 


226 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


army is equipped for battle. All is ready for 
the assault. Every preparation has been made 
to storm the city, to vindicate the military 
glory of the nation. The issue of the siege is 
not doubtful; God has promised that Israel 
shall possess the land. Why, then, delay! Why 
not give the signal to advance, and sweep like 
an avalanche upon the foe! So, perhaps, thinks 
Joshua. Not such is the will of the Almighty. 
The voice of God comes to him and says: ‘I 
send you to do great deeds, but you shall go 
by a lowly path—by the way of the valley. 
Leave the battle to Me, the shaking of the 
walls to Me! Take you the servant's post, the 
menial’s post! Walk round the city in pro- 
cession, you and your followers; walk, and 
blow the trumpets! Once every day, for six 
days, shall you compass it; and on the seventh 
day you shall compass it many times! Make 
no effort to break through the fortified places! 
I will make the breach; keep you to the 
marching and the blowing of the trumpets! 
Do not ask what is the use of your work; do 


not say that your talents are bound in a 


err tti—CStS 


JOSHUA THE PROSAIC 227 


napkin! No man is an agent in the hzstory 
of this world. I alone am the agent. It is I 
who make the breach in the walls of every 
Jericho. The most brilliant deed of man is 
only a signal for the moving of My hand. All 
are but blowers of the trumpet; all are but 
beaters of the drum. Why should you object 
to be a public revelation of that which is really 
a universal law!’ 

Again. He stands on the field of Gibeon— 
that bloodiest and most decisive field in the 
war for the conquest of Canaan. Yet, decisive 
as it was, it owed not its finality to Joshua. 
The Bible virtually says that the narrative of 
the battle is encumbered with legend. We 
will try to disentangle it from the legend. 
Five kings of the Amorites have combined 
their forces to overwhelm the little state of 
Gibeon, Gibeon has made a league with Israel 
—that is her offence. The five kings are afraid 
to attack Israel, but they will punish that small 
kingdom which has proclaimed itself her ally. 
Against such heavy odds Gibeon cannot stand. 
She sends up a cry of great despair. Joshua 


228 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


hears it. Should he allow his ally to perish for 
being anally! His heart forbids it. It is true, 
Gibeon has obtained the alliance by false 
pretences; but she as obtained it. Joshua 
regards Gibeon as blind old Isaac had regarded 
Jacob. Gibeon, like Jacob, had obtained a 
promise by deceit ; none the less, the promise, 
once given, was the will of God. It may have 
been wrong to make it; now that it was made, 
it was a part of God’s universe. Joshua will 
confirm the blessing to Gibeon as Isaac con- 
firmed the blessing to Jacob. He will not let 
her be crushed on zs account. He will hasten 
to her relief; he will defend her; he will 
rescue her. 

And so, the army of Gibeon and the army 
of Israel join hands against the host of the 
Amorites; and there is fought one of the 
bloodiest fights of history. It is to me one 
of the most interesting battles of the Bible, 
because it is fought, not for revenge, not for 
supremacy, not even for the cause of the 
Hebrew race, but simply and solely for motives 
humanitarian—for honour, for chivalry. It is 


Sr = 


a 


JOSHUA THE PROSAIC 229 


fought in behalf of a foreign land, in the 
impulse of human generosity, in obedience to 
the claims of man as man. One would almost 
think that the principles of the universal 
Decalogue had begun to inoculate the people 
of Israel, and that through the roar of battle 
and the clang of national jealousies there 
were discerned already the still small voice 
of brotherhood. 

Here, then, is an occasion for romantic 
heroism! Joshua has come in chivalry; will 
not the conflict prove his personal prowess ; 
will not his arm this day be revealed as the 
conquering arm! Such we expect; but such 
we do not find. The struggle at Gibeon is 
undertaken by the generosity of Joshua; but 
it is decided by the elements of nature. In 
the midst of the combat the sky is overcast 
and a storm gathers. From ever-deepening 
clouds there pours a torrent of fierce hail, 
which the wind bears right into the faces of 
the Amorites. They are disheartened; it 
seems as if heaven were shooting its arrows 
in favour of Israel. By and by the darkness 


230 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


becomes dense. The expression of the narra- 
tive is, ‘The sun became silent.’ It is not, 
‘The sun stood still,’ as our translation has it. 
The silence of light is a metaphor not for 
continuous shining, but for ceasing to shine. 
We read of the morning stars ‘singing together’; 
this means that they were shining together. 
What the Amorites see at Gibeon is not a 
prolonged day, but a premature night. And 
that night is their destruction. Beyond all 
things they are afraid of darkness. Their God 
is the sunshine. This premature sunset at 
Gibeon makes them feel that God has averted 
His countenance; He is against their enter- 
prise, on the side of their enemies! Vain is 
it to strive, vain is it to dare! Panic seizes 
them—the panic of believing that God has hid 
His face. They faint, they totter, they break 
into fragments. Unprepared for work in the 
night, they have no torches—they cannot fly. 
But Israel has torches, for Aer God rules by 


1 T understand Joshua x. 12 to mean that Joshua saw the 
sky overclouding and uttered a prayer for a premature darkness 
so that it might confound the Amorites. 


ne 


JOSHUA THE PROSAIC 231 


night as well as by day. And so, Israel presses 
forward, and the Amorites fall thick and fast. 
It is a crushing defeat and a deadly carnage. 
But again is Joshua only a follower of the 
stream. Here, as at Rephidim, here, as at 
Jericho, his part has been that of a spectator. 
He has not been a leader; he has been a satellite. 
He has derived his power from influences not 
his own—from the wind, from the hail, from 
the darkness. The possession of genius has 
been denied him; the gift of originality has 
been denied him; his one merit has been 
that he has been content to take the lower 
room. 

I wonder if any one realises what a merit 
that really is. I have said that the xatzonal 
galleries do not. There are three classes of 
men in this world—the men in advance of their 
time, the men wf to their time, and the men 
following their time. The first are decidedly 
original ; they have their place in every gallery. 
The second are ¢vyzng to be original; and they 
have their place in many galleries. The third 
have no originality ; they wait to obey orders; 


232 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


and they have a place in mo gallery—save in 
that of the Bible. But I think, in preparing a 
place for this third class, the Bible Gallery has 
shown a superior discernment. For, have you 
considered the merit of a man like Joshua! 
Have you considered the extreme difficulty of 
doing exclusively the work of routine! That 
work, as I have said, comprehends three-fourths 
of the business of life. It is the most necessary 
work in the world. Without it, human society 
would be dissolved in a single year. But, 
because it is the most common work, do we 
imagine it is therefore the easiest! To my 
mind, the marvels of humanity are not the 
men on the mount, but the men perpetually 
on the plain. I think Moses a greater man 
than Joshua; but I can account for Moses 
better than I can account for Joshua. I can 
understand why a man of high poetic instinct 
and strong aspirings after glory should occa- 
sionally do a commonplace thing well. But 
that a man whose feet have never touched the 
hills, that a man whose eye has never seen the 
heights, should repeat from day to day the 


JOSHUA THE PROSAIC 233 


habitual task and make no mistake therein— 
this is, to me, the miracle of miracles, this is 
the wonder of the world! 

We often express surprise that one who has 
for years been employed in routine work 
should, at the eleventh hour, make a glaring 
mistake. Our surprise is founded on the 
notion that the longer we pursue the same 
mechanical routine, the better we shall per- 
form it. I believe it to be just the reverse. [ 
have been told by preachers who were com- 
pelled to speak from memory, that they no- 
where felt in such danger of tripping as in the 
Lord’s Prayer. Why so? Simply because 
they knew it so mechanically. Its words had 
become to them a matter of routine; they 
were so familiar that they had ceased to waken 
self-reflection. It is precisely the same with 
the reiteration of every process which is merely 
physical. Tell Joshua to take, each day, a 
certain number of steps round Jericho, tell him 
to blow, each day, a certain number of blasts 
in front of the city, and it is probable his steps 
will decrease in accuracy and his blasts 


234 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


diminish in regularity. And if, in spite of this 
probability, Joshua obeys to the letter, if, in 
spite of prognostics to the contrary, he keeps 
the order of the march and of the signals, 
ought we not to conclude that Joshua is a 
worthy man-—a man worthy of all reverence, 
deserving of all esteem, demanding a perman- 
ent place in the gallery of human souls! 

The truth is, there is a kind of service that 
we have not sufficiently appreciated —the 
service given by unpoetic souls. The popular 
view is that unpoetic souls are better able to 
be drudges dy reason of their want of poetry. 
We say, ‘Martha is a matter-of-fact woman; 
it is natural to her to have much serving.’ 
It is not; it is w#znatural to her; and it is so 
precisely because she zs a _ matter-of-fact 
woman. The service of Martha is a sacrifice 
to duty. She has been obliged to put duty in 
the place of poetic impulse. She is working 
under privation—the want of poetry. She is 
in the position of one of the blind who make 
baskets; she would make them better with 
sight, but she must do the best she can with 


JOSHUA THE PROSAIC 235 


her existing faculties; and she deserves credit 
for doing so well in such adverse circumstances. 
Now, remember that the large majority are in 
Martha’s position. The mass of mankind have 
no illuminative vision. Is it not a great credit 
to them that they do their work without it! 
Does it not show that there is a strong sacri- 
ficial power on the common plane of humanity, 
when the men who cannot stand on Mount 
Nebo nor see the burning bush in the wilder- 
ness are yet able, from day to day, from 
month to month, from year to year, to go 
the prescribed round and perform the allotted 
task! 

And is it not well that this merit should 
be acknowledged! If other galleries have 
neglected to acknowledge it, is it not well 
that the old Hebrew Bible has, repaired the 
omission! Moses would have had his place in 
any gallery; Joshua has his place only here. 
I plead the claims of Joshua! I defend the 
selection which has given him a recognition in 
the records of the human race! Iam glad he 
has received a niche in the temple of fame, a 


236 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


corner amid the representative men of the 
world! Let him keep that corner—let the 
class which he represents keep it! Let the 
men who toil in the vineyard for the pay of 
each hour receive a tribute deyond the hour— 
the tribute of human admiration for work done 
without the support of an adequate motive 
and under the pressure of commonplace 
routine! That will be our best monument 


to the memory of Joshua! 


ORD, there are times when I get work to 

do whose good I cannot see! Some- 
times, before the walls of Jericho, there is put 
into my hand a trumpet when I think it should 
be a sword! Sometimes I am sent a long 
circuitous march when I expect to be retained 
for the assault! These moments are very 
hard to me. It is not the work that is hard; 
it is the want of vision. It is easy enough 
to blow the trumpet; it is a light thing 
to walk round the city. The hard thing is to 
see the good of it, to believe that I am not 


JOSHUA THE PROSAIC 237 


shunted from the race. Help me at such 
moments, O Lord, to say, ‘One step enough 
for me’! When the distant scene is denied 
me, when the gloom encircles me, when the 
things of to-morrow are veiled from me, help 
me to say, ‘One step enough for me’! When 
the voice of Moses is heard no more on the 
hill, when the Song of Miriam has been 
drowned by the roaring wind, when the fire of 
the bush has been hid by intervening trees, 
help me to say, ‘One step enough for me’! 
Let the one step be the ordered step, the com- 
manded step! Let me not ask how the sound 
of my trumpet can aid the fall of Jericho! 
Let me not ask why I am to go round about 
' when there is a short and easy way! If I am 
not to be Moses, let me be Joshua; if I am 
not to see the whole, let me see nothing—let 
me leave all to Zhee! I would have no half- 
vision, O my Father, for half-vision is a mis- 
leading thing. Either let me see the Promised 
Land with Moses, or with Joshua let me be 
led blindfold by Zee! When I see not the 
Promised Land, let me feel the Promised 


238 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


Hand! When I behold not Thine Ararat, let 
me touch Thine Arm! When I view not Thy 
Glory, let me have Thy Guzdance! When 
there is no dove from heaven, let there be a 
duty of the hour! When I have lost sight of 
Thy coming, let me strain the ear for Thy 
command! I shall not weep the want of the 
wing if only I can say, ‘One step enough for 


me’! 


CHAPTER XII 
SAMUEL THE SEER 


I HAVE said that there is a distinction between 
the earlier and the later forms in the Great 
Gallery —that, contrary to expectation, we 
proceed from the ideal to the actual. We have 
seen the religious life beginning in that which 
transcends the life of the hour, seeking a 
larger environment than that which earth can 
give. We have seen the Adams claiming a 
wider garden, and the Enochs aspiring to a 
fairer world. The story of the Tower of 
Babel itself, though the record of an act of 
impiety, is singularly illustrative of the 
religious tendencies of the Early Gallery; it 
shows us the child-man still in search ofa build- 
ing ‘behind the veil.’ But, as we enter further 
into the Gallery, we have observed a change. 


We have witnessed in Moses the beginning of 
239 


240 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


anew régime. Religion has come down from 
the clouds to tread the narrow way, the 
common, dusty way. This Gallery tells us it 
has been with first faith as it is with first 
poetry. Poetry begins with the stars, and 
clothes celestial things in human forms. But 
by and by it descends. Its whole /zstory has 
been a descent—a gradual stooping from the 
height to the valley. Each step has been a 
step nearer to the commonplace. Its dawn has 
been with the gods of mythology, its morning 
with the heroes of Homer, its forenoon with 
Dante’s vision of human destiny, its midday 
with Milton’s moral retrospect, its evening 
with Wordsworth’s little girl sitting with her 
porringer beside the grave. Even such is the 
course which this Gallery claims for relzgzon— 
a path from the high to the lowly, a road from 
the gold to the grey, a progress from the 
stones of the heavenly temple to the stones of 
the earthly quarry. 

Is the Gallery right? Yes; it is true to 
experience. It describes the course of faith 


in the heart of every man. At the opening of 


SAMUEL THE SEER 241 


life we see God in mysterious things—things 
which we cannot understand. We see Him 
in sudden death; we hear Him in the thunder- 
storm; we trace His footprints in the dread 
catastrophe. As we advance in years our 
standpoint is changed; we find God nearer the 
ground. We begin to discover Him in what we 
do understand, We used to see His wonders 
in what we believed to be abnormal ; but there 
comes a time when the marvel of a thing is its 
naturalness. The Psalmist says, ‘Open Thou 
mine eyes that I may behold wondrous things 
in Thy law’—‘in Thy commonplace require- 
ments. He had always been able to find 
such marvels in what he believed to be outside 
the law—the miraculous, the supernatural, the 
inexplicable. But he feels that the triumph 
of worship only truly comes when God is 
reverenced in His ordinary steps and recog- 
nised in the objects of the common day. He 
feels that the summer of religion will only be 
reached in that hour when the duties of prosaic 
life shall be duties done to God, and when 
Man’s interest in the affairs of Man shall be 


Q 


242 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


recognised as his surrender to the Father's 
will. 

I can almost trace the steps of gradation 
which mark the phases of faith displayed by 
the Great Gallery. At the most remote end 
of the Gallery stands Enoch. He has a far- 
away look. His eye is upturned toward the 
heavens. His God is ¢here, and he feels that 
he must ascend there to find Him. Then 
comes Noah. With him the Divine Spirit is 
no longer a silent spectator in the heavens; He 
moves on the face of the waters; He reveals 
His presence in the flood. Religion has come 
into contact with the earth, has shown itself 
as a world-power. Still, it has only touched 
the world on a grand scale. It has revealed 
itself in a big catastrophe, in a mighty revolu- 
tion, in a stupendous act of Providence. Man 
needs more than ¢hat for his spiritual sus- 
tenance. And so, as we traverse the Gallery, 
the Divine Spirit comes nearer still. It meets 
Man in his hours of special trouble. It meets 
the toiling Abraham under the oak of Mamre, 
the fretted Isaac in his struggles at Gerar, the 


SAMUEL THE SEER 243 


impoverished Jacob in his pillow of stone at 
Bethel. Yet Man wants more than even this, 
Life is not made up of moments fraught with 
crisis. It is made up of moments fraught with 
commonplace; and, if we would have a present 
God, He must meet us feve. And so, God 
draws nearer still to Man’s ordinary day. He 
comes to Moses in the revelation of a universal 
law—the law of conscience dictating the duty 
between man and man. Can He approach 
closerthan that? Yes. Zatwas the revelation 
of God in the community. But I want more 
than the life of the community; I want my 
own life made strong. Therefore, by and by, 
there appears in the Gallery a life distinguished 
only in this, that his physical strength is 
inspired by God, that his bodily force is 
stimulated and renewed by the direct action 
of the Divine Spirit. In that Picture—the 
figure of Samson, the Divine has come into 
closer touch with the human than even in the 
Portrait of Moses. Zhat was the illumination 
of conscience; ¢#zs is an illumination more 
condescending still—-the entrance of the 


244. THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


Divine strength into a tabernacle of human 
clay. 

I shall not linger, however, before the figure 
of Samson. I pass him by, for the simple 
reason that he is not the climax of the process. 
The climax appears in the next figure — 
Samuel. In Moses we have God touching the 
moral man ; in Samson we have God touching 
the physical man; but in Samuel we have a 
deeper stretch of condescension—God in com- 
munion with the life of a child. You have 
seen the noonday sun, in the course of its 
progress, centre for a moment its illumination 
on one corner of a valley. Even such is 
the illumination of Samuel. The light of 
heaven which has been long impending 
reaches in him the corner of the valley. We 
see a meeting of extremes—God and the 
child. That Divine Life which has dwelt in 
the heavens, moved in the flood, throbbed 
in the night of Bethel, and glittered in the 
revealings of Sinai, is seen concentrating its 
whole energy on the inspiring of a little boy. 
It is the latest stooping of the Spirit of God 


1 


SAMUEL THE SEER 245 


which the Gallery has yet proclaimed. Come, 
and let us meditate on this bridal of the earth 
and sky, this newest marriage ring which God 
has wrought for Man! Let us try to disregard 
all local circumstances! Let us ignore the 
things peculiar to the time; let us fix our eyes 
on that which is universal! Let us consider 
the meaning of this Portrait, not to the house 
of Israel, not to the house of Eli, not even to 
that visible house of God where the Jewish 
Priesthood ministered, but to you and me, to 
the furthest ends of the world, to the heart and 
conscience of humanity ! 

In the days when the High Priest Eli was 
Judge of Israel, there appeared in the sanctuary 
of Shiloh a wonderful child; his name was 
Samuel. It was a dark and stormy time; 
there were fears within and fightings without. 
Israel was climbing a steep hill—arduously, 
painfully. Her progress was slow; she was 
alternately worsted and victorious—to-day left 
in the valley, to-morrow gaining a_height. 
And the struggle was more arduous from the 
fact that there was no prophecy. It was an 


246 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


age of materialism. The hands of Moses were 
no longer uplifted on the mountain; the eyes 
of Moses no longer gazed on a promised glory. 
Religion had become a form; its sfzret had 
fled. There were few remains left of that. 
heroic time when Joshua had fought for God, 
and Deborah had sung for God. The nation 
had lost its poetry, and had lost its faith. 
These had to be recreated, kindled anew at the 
lamp of heaven. Where was the new kindling 
to begin? Where was the Divine Spirit to 
touch the world once more? In the heart of 
the sage? No. Inthe breast of the old man? 
No. In the leaders of the Jewish armies? 
No. It was to begin in the soul of a little 
child. Out of the mouth of a babe in 
knowledge, God was to ordain strength. All 
Israel was startled by the tidings that there 
had appeared a prophetic chi/d. From Dan 
to Beersheba there ran a thrill of wonder. 
Israel had been asking when the next Moses 
would appear. Here he came—in the garb of 
a tiny boy! Men were speechless with sur- 
prise. It was a surprise that was never to be 


oo 


SAMUEL THE SEER 247 


equalled until that day when Christ was to puta 
little child in the centre of the apostolic band. 
Was he a miracle—this little Samuel? No 
—in the view characteristic of the Bible he is 
the real and normal aspect of humanity. So 
normal is he that Christ says we must all 
return to his state before we can become seers. 
What, think you, does Jesus mean when He 
declares that we can only realise the beauty of 
the kingdom through the eyes of a little child? 
Is it not simply this, that to see the beauty of 
anything we require a first eye? Take the 
Bible itself. Perhaps of all literary produc- 
tions it is, from a literary point of view, the 
least appreciated. Why so? Just because 
its words are the most familiar. To see the 
beauties of the Bible, one would require to say 
to us what the prophet said to Hezekiah, ‘ Let 
the shadow go back ten degrees!’ We should 
need to be transported back into life’s morning, 
to divest ourselves of all preconceived opinions, 
to imagine that we were reading the record for 
the first time. That is precisely the standpoint 
which Christianity promises to create. It 


248 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


professes to make old things new, in other 
words, to let us see the old things as they looked 
when they were new, and so to give us a true 
sense of their power and beauty. What is this 
but to recreate in us the life of Samuel! 
What is this but to say that the true seer must 
ever be a child, that, however grown-up he be, 
it is by the survival of his childhood that he 
sees the kingdom of God! Little Samuel is 
mo miracle. He reveals the normal law of 
faith. He is the first of the prophets because 
he is the first of inspired children. He is a 
representative maz in religion because he is a 
representative child. All seers of God’s king- 
dom have seen it by the light of their child- 
hood. We do not drop our childhood when 
we become men; we carry it with us into 
the life of men. Every sage bears within 
his bosom a little Samuel—an_ instinctive 
child-life which concludes without reasoning, 
adores without arguments, worships without 
symbols, prays without words. The man who 
listens to ¢hzs voice is a prophet of the 
Kingdom. 


SAMUEL THE SEER 249 


Let us look now at the form in which this 
voice came to the child Samuel. We all like 
to witness the beginning of things. We learn 
more from the origin of a process than from 
all its future manifestations. We are permitted 
to witness the first hour of the religious vision 
of Samuel. If that first hour were something 
abnormal, it would not be worth considering. 
But it is not abnormal ; it is the rule according 
to which all Divine vision comes. There are 
two things about Samuel’s illumination which 
are very prominent in the Picture, and which 
seem to me to be typical of religious illumina- 
tion in general. Let us glance at each of them 
as they are exhibited in the Great Gallery. 

The first is that the call of Samuel does not 
come to him as a call from heaven, but as a 
voice from earth. This is all the more remark- 
able in the light of the fact that from the very 
outset Samuel was placed in a religious 
environment. His parents wished him to be 
a pious child. From the dawn of his intelli- 
gence they consigned him to the care of the 
High Priest Eli, in whose house he became a 


250 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


servant. His employment was in the things 
of the sanctuary. He ministered in the temple 
of Shiloh. What he did, we do not exactly 
know. Of course, it must have been work 
external to the actual service of the sanctuary ; 
yet he wore a little ephod to mark the fact 
that he was engaged in temple duty. In any 
case, he was breathing every moment the 
atmosphere of the house of God and using 
every day the symbols of things Divine. 
We expect it will be in the discharge of 
these duties that his illumination will come. 
No. It is when the work of the day is done, 
when the little priest has retired to rest, 
that the message from heaven greets him. 
And it does not greet him as a message from 
heaven. A voice cries ‘Samuel!’—he never 
dreams it is any other voice than that of Eli. 
He rises from his couch to get his orders from 
human lips; ‘I did not call you,’ says his 
master. He lies down again; and again a 
voice cries ‘Samuel!’ A second time he 
deems it to be only human; a second time he 
is told there has been no human call. Once 


SAMUEL THE SEER 251 


more he seeks his rest, and once more the 
voice cries ‘Samuel!’ Even then he believes 
it to be human; even then he deems it a 
summons from earthly lips. The voice of God 
has assumed the accents of a man. 

Now, in this feature of the Portrait the artist 
has recorded not an abnormal, but a universal 
symptom of the religious life. Our deepest 
impressions of spiritual things come to us 
indirectly, It is not by a voice from heaven 
that a man believes himself to be in the 
presence of God; it is by the blending of 
earthly voices. When two or three circum- 
stances, distinctively different in origin and 
emanating from different points of the compass, 
appear to converge towards one definite result, 
we are constrained to say, ‘This is the will of 
God.’ How does a man get inspired with the 
belief that God has a mission for him? By 
imagining he hears voices from the sky? 
Very rarely has it been thus. In the large 
majority of cases the sense of a Divine mission 
has come from observing how independent 
events have conspired in place and time to 


252 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


further an individual destiny. An Egyptian 
princess happens to be passing when a child is 
floating on the Nile river; that child in after 
years will probably feel that his life was pre- 
served for something. A band of Ishmaelites 
is on its journey at the very spot and hour in 
which a boy is about to experience violence; 
that boy in the days to come will claim a 
special destiny. A ram is caught by the horns 
in a thicket at the very moment when a man is 
debating within himself what would be the 
most suitable burnt offering; that ram will 
assuredly be accepted as the object of sacrifice 
preferred by heaven. 

There is a remarkable passage in the Jewish 
Scriptures, ‘Ye shall hear a voice dehind you, 
saying, “This is the way; walk ye in it!”’ 
I believe that to the Jew the voice of God ever 
came from behind—from the region of past 
experience. He followed because he felt he 
had been already led—led by a stream of 
tendencies over which he had no control, and 
whose united currents had been produced by 
a connection he could not understand. He 


SAMUEL THE SEER 253 


heard the Divine because he had first heard 
the human. The voice of God came to him 
as the voice of Eli—as the voice of earthly 
influences. It was in looking back that he 
saw their sacred character. It was in retrospect 
that he recognised the presence of the Spirit 
of God beneath those seemingly mechanical 
movements which had shaped his worldly way. 

But there is a second feature in this call of 
Samuel which is worthy of our attention. 
From the moment in which he recognised the 
real origin of the message, he perceived it to be 
something which would disturb the calm of his 
life. It brought not peace, but a sword. What 
was this message which young Samuel re- 
ceived? It was the command to denounce the 
wickedness of the house of Eli. I do not 
suppose that he then heard of this wickedness 
for the first time ; doubtless there had already 
rung in his ears many human complaints. But 
now for the first time it was borne in upon him 
that these human complaints were the voice of 
God. His conscience told him that, if he were 
a true minister at the Divine altar, it was 


254 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


incumbent on him to bring before the High 
Priest Eli the iniquity of his own family. 
When conscience spoke, Samuel resolved to 
obey ; but consider what that resolve meant to 
him! To obey it, was to endanger all his 
worldly interests. It was likely to procure his 
dismissal from the service of the High Priest; 
and to be dismissed from the service of a 
High Priest would be, in the opinion of the 
Jewish race, to contract an indelible stain. 
The choice before Samuel was the choice 
between the rose and the thistle. On the one 
side was comfort for the present and an open 
door for the future; on the other there was 
a probable expulsion into the cold world and 
a shutting of all the gates which led to pro- 
motion. 

Now, although the case of Samuel is an 
accentuated one, the call of duty is nearly 
always a call to struggle, The very idea of 
duty implies restraint or comstraint. Duty is 
the middle term between compulsion and love; 
it is halfway between Egypt and Canaan; it is 
the desert. Outward force has passed, but 


SAMUEL THE SEER 255 


spontaneity has not yet come. I move volun- 
tarily ; but I move with a burden, and I move 
slowly. I have met my angel, but I struggle 
with my angel; I have seen God face to face, 
but I halt upon my thigh. Our moments 
of duty are never unconscious moments, never 
light-hearted moments. They have always a 
sense of pressure, always an obstruction at the 
door. The life of Samuel is, from the dawn, 
a life of sacrifice. The path on which his 
childhood went forth was a path of thorns; 
and he took it knowing it to be so. All who 
have followed his steps have had to tread the 
same narrow way. In all ages Herod has 
sought the young child to kill it. The Divine 
life has always run counter to a worldly 
principle, and has required to make its way in 
conflict with that principle. The road of in- 
dividual pleasure is not parallel with the road 
of virtue. They will diverge with you as they 
diverged with Samuel—at the very point where 
duty calls. The hour of his spiritual promotion 
was precisely that hour which presaged his 
material degradation. The experience of the 


256 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


first prophet will be the experience of all 
Christian seers, 

I have confined myself to the opening of 
Samuel’s life, because it is in the opening of 
his life that he is universally representative. 
He was to live long, to do much, to suffer 
many things. He was to purify public wor- 
ship, to root out idolatry, to judge the tribes 
of Israel, to humble the pride of the Philistine, 
to be the maker and the unmaker of kings. 
The sense of his presence in the nation was 
to be so vivid that it was to outlast even his 
life, for, after he had passed away, men were 
to believe in the apparition of his spectre. But 
these things belong to the annals of Judaism, 
not to the annals of humanity. What belongs 
to humanity is the fact that the spirit of pro- 
phecy came to him through the spirit of a 
little child. This is the one abiding element in 
the life of Samuel. It is the one element 
which is not connected with Shiloh, with 
Ramah, with Gilgal, with any local haunt 
whatever, but which is found in every place 
and at every time. The name of Samuel is 


SAMUEL THE SEER 257 


traditionally associated with the establishing 
of the prophetic school; and his spirit of 
prophecy came to him in childhood. That is 
the fact of permanent interest in this delinea- 
tion of the Great Gallery ; for it is still through 
the intuitions of the child-life that Man sees 
the kingdom of God. 

There were three great functions in the 
Jewish nation whose simultaneous existence 
was contemporary with the life of Samuel— 
the, Prophet, the Priest, and the King. ‘I 
believe these three represent the three periods 
in the conception of time—yesterday, to-day, 
and to-morrow. The Priest is the representa- 
tive of the past. He exists as a salve to the 
pains of memory—the memory of sins com- 
mitted in days of old; his sacrifices are efforts 
to wash these away. The King represents the 
present. He exists to guide the hand at the 
actual hour, to give the law which shall regu- 
late the immediate course of action. But the 
Prophet is the representative of the future. 
He exists to tell, not merely of forthcoming 
events, but of eternal principles. It is his 

R 


258 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


mission to reveal the issues of right and wrong 
—to proclaim how, by an inevitable law, the 
one will bring joy and the other pain. And 
therefore it is that the organ of the prophetic 
life is ever the spirit of the child. Childhood 
is the time that looks forward. Old age 
habitually looks Jack; it is the time for memory. 
Manhood generally looks round; it is the time 
for observation. But childhood looks forward ; 
it is the time for hope. Judaism provided for 
all three; she comforted the soul on every 
side. Her Priest comforted the memory; he 
suggested an expiation of the past. Her King 
gave strength for present weakness; he sur- 
rounded her with defensive bulwarks. Her 
Prophet pointed her on to a bright morning, 
to a day when the harvest sown in tears 
should be reaped in joy, and when the desert 
should be glad and blossom as the rose. The 
nation equipped with these is equipped indeed. 


Y Father, prepare a place for the child. 
life that lingers in my heart! Prepare 
a place for that instinct which points toward 


SAMUEL THE SEER 259 


to-morrow! Thou hast prepared a place for 
my yesterday—Thou hast cancelled the dark 
deeds of my past. Thou hast prepared a 
place for to-day—Thou hast promised strength 
for the hour. But I have a need beyond my 
yesterday, beyond to-day; I have a yearning 
for to-morrow. Shall this be the only part of 
my soul for which there is no environment! 
Thou hast provided for memory—Thou hast 
suffered my heart to see its past glorified. 
Thou hast provided for the vision of to-day— 
Thou hast sent the energy with the emergency 
and the refuge with the storm. But is there 
to be no provision for hope, O my Father! 
Thou hast a voice to greet my ear when I 
turn dackward; Thou hast a voice to greet 
my ear when I turn vound; hast Thou no 
voice to greet my ear when I look forward. 
Shall the door of my future be the only 
unopened door! Why, then, hast Thou taught 
me to knock there! When I knock at the 
door of memory, I am answered; I can undo 
much that tarnished my yesterday. When [| 
knock at the door of to-day, Iam answered, 


260 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


I can help to move the wheel that moves the 
world. But when I knock at the door of to- 
morrow, shall there be no answer but the 
delusive echo of my heart! Shall hope be a 
blind-alley—the one blind-alley of the universe! 
Shall aspiration be-winged—for no atmosphere! 
Shall faith be fledged—for no flight! Shall 
foresight be given—for no future! Shall there 
be longings on the sea—when there never was 
land! Shall there be a sense of prophecy— 
when there has been no word of promise! It 


cannot be, O my Father! 


CHAPTER XIII 
DAVID THE MANY-SIDED 


It is very rarely that a nation has associated 
all her attributes with the life of a single man. 
I say ‘rarely’ to avoid the possibility of 
exaggeration; but I do not myself know one 
instance of a purely national gallery having 
doneso. The pride of a country has generally 
been to have a diversified gallery—to divide 
her great professions among different men. 
Britain places her Shakespeare in a unique 
position of glory; but she would not seek to 
claim for him a union of a// the professions. 
She is content to behold his genius in his 
special sphere—the sphere of the poet. She 
does not insist on recognising in him a con- 
centration of all departments—the science of 
a Newton, the logic of a Bacon, the states- 


manship of a Chatham, the military skill of a 
261 


262 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


Marlborough. She is proud to think that in 
enumerating her different sources of glory she 
can assign each of them to a separate name. 
But in that one Gallery which is not national 
we meet with the spectacle which is elsewhere 
absent. We find a people, through long 
centuries of its history and through devious 
changes of its fortune, consistently and per- 
sistently agreeing to heap upon a single 
individual the aggregate glories of every pro- 
fession in life. Israel has fixed her affections 
upon an ideal whose very name expresses the 
object uniting all desires—David—the beloved. 
To claim one man as’the object of all national 
desires is a claim not easily sustained. It can 
only be supported on the supposition that this 
one man has passed through every national 
experience, has filled every sphere, has par- 
taken of every circumstance. Accordingly, 
the David of Israel is not simply the greatest 
of her kzugs; he is the man great in every- 
thing. He monopolises all her institutions. 
He is her shepherd boy—the representative of 
her zozling classes. He is her musician—the 


DAVID THE MANY-SIDED 263 


successor of Jubal and Miriam and Deborah. 
He is her soldier—the conqueror of all the 
Goliaths that would steal her peace. He is 
her knight-errant—bringing mercy into war. 
He is her king—numbering her armies and 
regulating her polity. He is her priest— 
substituting a broken and contrite spirit for 
the blood of bulls and rams. He is her 
prophet—presaging with his latest breath the 
everlastingness of his kingdom. He is her 
poet—all her psalms are called by his name. 
The truth is, in the estimation of Israel this 
man is a personification of the nation itself— 
the embodiment of her qualities, the incarna- 
tion of her spirit, the type of her destiny. A 
conception so unique deserves consideration. 
How can we better photograph the form of 
David than by presenting the analogy between 
the picture of his life and the life of ancient 
Israel—that Israel which saw in him a mirror 
of her own soul! 

Even the Zzstory of Israel seems to repeat 
itself in David. What do we see at the 
outset of his life? A shepherd boy with a 


264 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


very unlikely prospect of success and a very 
big presentiment of glory! Like the nation, 
he was born to a pastoral life; he fed his 
father’s sheep on the plains of Bethlehem. 
Like the nation, he was deemed, in his 
morning, very insignificant. He had seven 
brothers—strong, stalwart, gigantic men. These 
were pointed to as the men who would serve 
their country. Little David was, like little 
Israel, a pigmy among the giants; and the 
world said, ‘ He will never equal his brothers!’ 
Yet little David had within that soul of his 
an ambition, compared to which that of his 
brothers was a molehill. He, like his tiny 
country, had a dream of empire—that dream 
which had its beginning when Abraham heard 
his mission under the Chaldean stars. He, 
like Abraham, had received a prophetic voice, 
had felt the touch of an anointing hand. 
Ever, amid the bleating of the sheep, there had 
sounded in his ear a deep refrain, ‘ You will be 
king of Israel! you will be king of Israel!’ 
He kept the dream in his heart, he told it not; 
but all the warmer did it burn because it could 


DAVID THE MANY-SIDED 265 


not be spoken. And though it could not be 
spoken, it could be sung; it made songs with- 
out words. It tuned the strings of his harp; 
it accompanied his music; it imparted to his 
notes a wild dash and daring which made them 
seem to strike the stars. He was unconscious 
of their power; he played spontaneously— 
played to relieve himself. But just on that 
account he was overheard ; unconscious genius 
ever zs overheard. Men stood and listened in the 
night to the great musician. They spread his 
fame. They told how a nightingale had come. 
They spoke of a harp with chords inspired. 
And by and by the tidings reached the 
most august ear in all the land. They came to 
the royal palace; they were heard by Saul the 
king. Saul was passing through an hour of 
mental darkness. There had come to him, as 
there comes to many of us, an unaccountable 
unrest. Weare told of a peace that ‘ passeth 
understanding’; there is also a dzspeace that 
‘passeth understanding.’ There are clouds in 
themind which arenot explained bycloudsin the 
sky, for they often come in our days of outward 


266 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


sunshine. Saul had such an experience. He 
was afflicted from within—afflicted in the midst 
of his exaltation, on the pinnacle of that 
proud height to which fortune had raised him. 
Material conditions had not caused the 
malady; material conditions could not remove 
the malady. Might not z#material conditions 
be tried! If the disorder originated from 
within, might it not be conquered from within! 
Might not maszc have power to minister to a 
mind diseased! Why not call in the aid of 
this wonderful player whose powers of melody 
were bruited everywhere! Why not send for 
David ! 

David is sent for, and comes; and, as he 
comes, the Gallery repeats in him another of 
its past stages. He has already heard the call 
of Abraham; he is about to experience the 
call of Isaac. The call of Abraham was the 
summoning to a life of glory ; the call of Isaac 
was the summoning to a life of domestic 
ministration. When David entered the house 
of Saul he abandoned, for the time, his dream. 
He laid aside his desire to rule; he tried to 


DAVID THE MANY-SIDED 267 


serve, to dig wells of comfort for the heart of 
another. And not without success. As he 
played, the malady of Saul subsided; the 
clouds parted, and a stream of sunshine burst 
upon his soul. If a pupil in a Sunday-school 
were asked, ‘ Who was the first man influenced 
by the Psalms of David?’ he would not go very 
far wrong if he answered, ‘Saul.’ It is true, 
these melodies were songs without words; but 
they were not songs without thoughts. On 
the poor wandering soul of the monarch they 
had all the effect of a sweet and solemn 
prayer; they said, ‘Peace! Be still!’ They 
were the earliest psalms of David—psalms of 
unspoken words, psalms of undefined comfort, 
psalms whose Divine message came only in 
music. When the critics have disposed of all 
the rest, they will leave to the minstrel these 
jirst chords. 

And now the scene changes once more, and 
there is repeated another past phase of the 
Hebrew Gallery. The experience of David 
has echoed the call of Abraham and the 
domestic ministration of Isaac; it is now to 


268 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


echo the troubles of Joseph. He has had the 
dream of empire; he has had the stage of 
domestic life ; he is now to have the experience 
of private jealousies—jealousies of which, like 
Joseph, he is to be, not the sharer, but the victim. 
There is a passion which music cannot quell, 
which culture cannot calm, which art cannot 
allay; it is envy. In the court of Israel the 
personality of the young minstrel is magnetic; 
he draws all eyes, he wins all hearts. Men 
begin to contrast his face of morning bright- 
ness with the dark and lowering countenance 
of their monarch. Saul awakes from his 
nervous derangement and looks round. He 
sees the situation at a glance. He is losing 
ground; he is being superseded in the 
affections of his people—superseded by a 
Stripling! He must vemove this centre of 
magnetism from the eyes of men. What is he 
to do! How is he to get rid of him! By 
open violence? No; that would be unpopular. 
He will follow the method of Joseph’s 
brethren; he will cause him to disappear by 
seeming accident. He will make him captain 


DAVID THE MANY-SIDED 269 


of a thousand men ; he will send him into the 
front of battle, into positions where death 
will be almost inevitable. By means that will 
waken no suspicion he will remove this 
shepherd boy. 

But the means are allin vain. David at the 
head of the thousand is only more magnetic 
still. He performs deeds of prowess and 
becomes the right hand of Israel. What is to 
be done with this troublesome prodigy! A 
new device presents itself to the mind of Saul— 
so at least I read the narrative He will 
simulate a return of his malady. He will 
pretend to be agazz mad; and in this seeming 
madness he will give David his deathblow. 
Again the project fails; the musician eludes 
the javelin. Did the penetrating eye of David 
see through the subterfuge? I[ think it did. 
Be this as it may, the mask is now withdrawn. 
The baffled monarch turns at bay. He has 
failed in strategy; he will take means direct, to 
rid himself of this rival. David is warned— 


1] think the incident recorded in 1 Samuel xviii. Ir a 
misplaced anticipation of that recorded in I Samuel xix. 10. 


270 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


warned from within the palace, warned by 
Saul’s own son. There is but one refuge— 
flight. David disappears from court. He 
wanders a while in the secluded parts of Israel. 
But no part of Israel is secluded enough to 
screen him from the eye of Saul. He must fly 
farther. He must leave his country altogether. 
He must become a stranger in a strange land. 
Again the national history repeats itself in 
David. He, like his country, becomes an 
exile, and wanders in a land of Egypt. He 
treads a foreign soil; he is a fugitive and an 
outcast; he is indebted to the charity of others. 
He is oppressed and weary, now on the 
mountain, now in the vale—to-day skirting a 
ravine, to-morrow lurking in a cave—some- 
times alone in the wilderness, sometimes within 
touch of his adversary. At one moment heis 
seen in Philistia; at another he treads the 
mountains of Engedi; at a third he is by the 
waters of the Dead Sea. The sea of his own 
life is dead; he has hung his harp on the 
willows; he has resolved to sing no more. 


Then the curtain rises anew, and the life of 


DAVID THE MANY-SIDED 271 


David continues to repeat the history of Israel. 
After the exile comes the exodus; after the 
land of bondage comes the conquest of Canaan. 
David's life has hitherto been itself a harp of 
many strings. Each chord has renewed the 
existence of some bygone age of the national 
annals. He has begun with the shepherd life 
of Abel. He has received the anointing 
mission of Abraham. He has served at the 
domestic hearth with Isaac. He has experi- 
enced the envy that assailed the life of Joseph. 
He has passed into that exile where dawned 
the day of Moses. He is now to emerge into 
that struggle which secured the land to Joshua, 
and to repeat in his own life the transition 
from exile into empire. 

Nor is there wanting a point of resemblance 
between the conquest by Joshua and the con- 
quest by David. In both cases there is an 
absence of personal glory. I have shown this 
in the case of Joshua; it is even more marked 
in the case of David. It is not really David’s 
prowess that wins him the kingdom; it is the 
trend of circumstances—or, as men would then 


272 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


have called it, the hand of the Lord. The 
battle which shattered the fortunes of Saul was 
not fought by David—was not fought even in 
the interest of David. It was the Phz/estines 
that made room for David in Israel—made 
room without meaning to do so. It was on 
the field of Gilboa that the pride of Saul was 
extinguished—a field on which Israel and 
Philistia fought for their own ends. That 
battle almost annihilated the house of Saul. 
He perished; three of his sons perished; the 
flower of his army perished. Israel was in the 
position of England after the Wars of the 
Roses. She had lost ‘the last of the barons’— 
the last of the great leaders on whom Saul’s 
house could depend. Any strong hand would 
be sure to hold the reins in a nation so struck 
with panic. Yet, even in this panic-struck 
nation, the strong hand of David did not at 
once become supreme. There was a lingering 
loyalty to the house of Saul. Eleven of the 
tribes clung to his memory and enthroned his 
son. One tribe alone declared for David—the 


tribe of Judah. For seven years there were 


DAVID THE MANY-SIDED 273 


two kings in Israel—each claiming undivided 
empire. For seven years there was internecine 
war between David and the remnant of Saul’s 
house; and, though the balance of success 
inclined to David, his final triumph came not 
from his sword. It came from an act of 
desertion on the part of an enemy, from the 
abandonment of the house of Saul by one of 
its leading supporters. On the whole, I am 
disposed to think that David realised his 
mission mainly by the grace of God; or, if you 
prefer its rationalistic equivalent, mainly by 
the stream of tendencies which converged, in 
place and time, so as to effect the issue. His 
stage of climax was the stage of Joshua. The 
walls of his Jericho happened to fall precisely 
at the moment when he happened to blow the 
trumpet. He was little more than a sfectator 
of the scene which crowned him. His merit 
was in waiting for the tide and taking the 
tide. He was never more humble than on his 
road to the throne. 

I have thus sought to institute a parallel 
between the history of David and the history 

S 


274 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


of the Jewish race. The evolutionist tells us 
that in the stages of birth the human individual 
passes through the phases of the ascending 
animal series from the fish to the mammal. 
I think the individuality of David repeated the 
history of its Auman ancestors — incarnated 
within itself the previous life of the nation. 
But it is not only David’s kzstory that reveals 
the collective life of Israel; his character does 
so too. There is not in all biography a more 
remarkable delineation than the character of 
David. We have pictures of strikingly good 
men; we have pictures of singularly bad men; 
we have pictures of men who are half good and 
half bad. None of these designations will cover 
David. Measured by a Christian standard, he 
is no saint. Measured by a heathen standard, 
he is no sinner. Measured by aay standard, 
he is no mixture—he never exhibits a blending 
of good and bad. How, then, shall we describe 
him? If he is not a telescope of uniform 
sublimities, nor a microscope of uniform little- 
nesses, nor yet a union of telescope and micro- 
scope in which one eye can see the sublime 


DAVID THE MANY-SIDED 275 


and the other the small, what is he? He isa 
kaleidoscope. He reveals a series of seemingly 
disconnected scenes of which the later often 
reverses the picture given by the earlier. In 
each scene appears, not a phase of the man, 
not a quality of the man, but the whole man. 
Yet the David of to-day is often a direct 
contrast to the David of yesterday; but for 
his face and form we should not recognise 
him. Yesterday, he had one pure spiritual 
friendship—the devotion to Jonathan ; to-day, 
he has many sensuous loves. Yesterday, he 
was modest and retiring; to-day, through 
vanity, he vaunts the number of his fighting 
men, Yesterday, he was open and confiding ; 
to-day, he deceives his benefactor Achish. 
Yesterday, he was chivalrous to his enemies; 
to-day—if the passage be genuine—he denies 
forgiveness to his greatest general. Yesterday, 
he saved the life of Saul, his foe; to-day, he 
takes the life of Uriah, his friend. How came 
such a character to exist? Is there any con- 
nection in its acts beyond what is effected by 
the shaking of life’s kaleidoscope? Can we 


276 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


account for a phenomenon seemingly so 
grotesque and really so contradictory? 

I think we can. I believe this man epitomised 
not only the past history, but the past passions, 
of Israel. I believe the two streams of heredity 
which had run in separate channels through 
the path of the nation met at last in a 
single life—the life of David. If I were to 
christen these two streams, I should call them 
‘The Lion’ and ‘The Lamb.’ Look back over 
the history of the Hebrew race, you will find 
the moral life of that race ever depicted as a 
strife between two. Go where you will, you 
are ever confronted by a pair. Every lamb 
has its opposing lion. Abel has his Cain; 
Abraham has his Lot; Isaac has his Ishmael; 
Jacob has his Esau; Joseph has his ‘ Brethren’ ; 
Moses has his Amalek; Joshua has his Achan, 
In David the two pass into one. He becomes 
the heir to a double heredity. The strings of 
his life-harp are swept by two impulses— 
a south wind and a north—the one bringing 
music, the other discord. When you see him 
proceeding from the altar of God to a life of 


DAVID THE MANY-SIDED Habs: 


sensuality, it is not correct to say that he has 
had a fall from grace. If you walk through a 
town and at certain parts come to vacant 
spaces, will this prove that the city is losing 
its inhabitants? It will prove the reverse. 
These vacant spaces are the survivals of yester- 
day. They suggest that yesterday there were 
no buildings at all—that the present amount of 
population has been planted on spots which 
were originally in the same condition. So is 
it with the bad deeds of David. They are sur- 
vivals of an old time—not falls from new grace. 
Not all at once could the city of God be built 
within him. Not all at once could the barren 
swamps be filled with homes and hearths of 
culture. Not all at once could the wild beasts 
of the forest be rooted out and the voice of 
Man be made to echo through the waste places. 
Not all at once could the forms of the past that 
lived within him die—the violent Cain, the wild 
Ishmael, the selfish Lot, the reckless Esau, the 
deceitful brethren of Joseph. These remained 
as the memories of yesterday ; they waited the 
expansion of the city to clear them away. 


278 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


Here, then, was a region in which David was 
not king—the region of the heart. I mean, his 
own heart. He had a power of captivating 
the heart of others; but he never took captive 
his own. All the winds of the past strove for 
the mastery of that great sea. Each prevailed 
in turn. Sometimes it was swept by the gust 
of anger, sometimes by the blast of impurity, 
sometimes by the storm of doubt, sometimes 
by the breeze of generous sympathy. At 
morning it caught the glow, at noon the glare, 
at evening the gloom. It was the heart ofa 
child ; the impression of the moment ruled it. 
David /fe/¢t the weakness, and cried out for a 
king over himself. Hecalled aloud forsome one 
mighty enough to still the tempest of his heart. 
This is the deepest note of his whole biography 
—his distrust of himself, of his own power, of 
his own judgment. I do not wonder the hymns 
of Israel are called the psalms of David; they 
reflect him, they mirror him—mirror most of 
all his distrust of himself. When they cry 
‘I have made the Most High my Refuge !’— 
when they exclaim, ‘O God my Shield, look on 


DAVID THE MANY-SIDED 279 


the face of Thine anointed !’—when they pray, 
‘Hide me in the secret of Thy pavilion!’ do 
we not hear the refrain of that life which could 
find no help but in God! There is not in the 
whole Gallery the picture of a soul so conscious 
of its weakness. David will do nothing without 
God. He will neither lead an army nor build 
a temple without the preliminary Voice. He 
has no confidence in his own will. Sau/ had 
confidence in his own will. He was a weaker 
man all round; but he rarely felt the need of 
the Lord. David has in his veins the strength 
of two conflicting streams of heredity ; yet his 
deepest sense is that of his own nothingness. 
His name has become almost a synonym for 
the conviction of personal sin. 

And do you not see that David’s sense of 
moral impotence has originated precisely in 
the strength of the contending elements within 
him. Had there been only one element— 
whether good or bad—he would never have felt 
that impotence. Had he been simply an 

amiable passionless creature untempted by 
‘violent impulses and unassailed by the glitter 


280 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


of vice, he might have done less harm to his 
generation, but he would never have cultivated 
his special flower—the thirst for God. Why 
is this man ever longing in a dry parched land 
where no water is? Precisely because his was 
not an untempted nature. He wanted to be 
good, but he could not. He had too big an 
inheritance of past corruption to believe in his 
own strength. His thirst for God came from 
his personal experience of the meagreness of 
his own soul. A placid nature would never 
have felt the impotence and would never have 
known the thirst; he would have failed to 
cultivate David’s special flower. David stands 
in the Gallery with a unique message—that 
the forces of the natural world are not sufficient 
to make a man good. It is the message 
commonly called evangelical. The man who 
preaches it from his heart must ever be one 
who has come fresh from the storm. He who 
knows not the power of passion, who feels not 
the seductions of sense, who never sails except 
on summer seas, may say indeed, ‘ Give us our 
daily bread,’ but will find little need to say, 


DAVID THE MANY-SIDED 281 


‘Deliver us from evil.’ If David is to cultivate 
the flower whose ‘ language’ is that prayer, he 
will have to hear the roar of the breakers and 
experience the crash of the timbers and learn 
what it is to utter the piercing cry, ‘Save us; 
we perish!’ That was the education adapted 
to him; that was the education he received. 
To the city of his habitation he was led by a 
rough way, because the rough way was for him 
the only right way; his mission was to pro- 
claim the heart’s need of God. | i | 


Y heart needs Thee, O Lord, my heart 
needs Thee! Wo part of my being 

needs Thee like my heart. All else within me 
can be filled by Thy gz/ts. My hunger can be 
satisfied by daily bread. My thirst can be 
allayed by earthly waters. My cold can be 
removed by household fires. My weariness 
can be relieved by outward rest. But no 
outward thing can make my eart pure. The 
calmest day will not calm my passions. The 
fairest scene will not beautify my soul. The 


282 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


richest music will not make harmony within. 
The breezes can cleanse the air; but no breeze 
ever cleansed a spirit. This world has not 
provided for my ear¢t. It has provided for 
my eye; it has provided for my ear; it has 
provided for my touch ; it has provided for my 
taste; it has provided for my sense of beauty 
—but it has not provided for my heart. 
Provide Zhou for my heart,O Lord! It is the 
only unwinged bird in all creation; give it 
wings, O Lord! Earth has fatled to give it 
wings; its very power of loving has often 
dragged it in the mire. Be 7hou the strength 
of my heart! Be Thou its fortress in tempta- 
tion, its shield in remorse, its covert in the 
storm, its star in the night, its voice in the 
solitude! Guide it in its gloom; help it in its 
heat; direct it in its doubt; calm it in its 
conflict; fan it in its faintness; prompt it in 
its perplexity ; lead it through its labyrinths ; 
raise it from its ruins! / cannot rule this heart 
of mine; keep it under the shadow of Thine 


own wings! 


CHAPTER XIV 
SOLOMON THE WISE 


IN standing before the Picture of Solomon, ! 
am conscious of an impression which I have 
not hitherto experienced—an absence of the 
dramatic element. All the previous figures 
have stood in critical situations. Adam in the 
garden, Abel in the field, Noah in the 
presence of the Divine Judgment, Abraham 
in his arduous mission, Isaac in his life of 
domestic sacrifice, Joseph in his dungeon, 
Moses in his desert, Joshua in his wars, 
Samuel in his call to imperil his worldly 
prospects, David in his exile from home and 
country—all have exhibited the spectacle of 
difficulty and danger. In Solomon we have a 
life where the difficulty and danger are nod 
exhibited. They are there; but they are 


unseen. What we do see, in the foreground, 
288 


284 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


is an event which will be found to pertain to 
the life of every young man in the world—the 
choice of a profession. Solomon is asked, as 
many boys and all youths are asked, what he 
would like to be. Hewas already a king ; but 
one may be a king in many ways. Solomon 
is asked what gift he would chiefly prize asa 
sign of real greatness. There is spread before 
his fancy what is spread before the fancy of 
all romantic young men—a choice of golden 
possibilities. Would he be rich? Would he 
be powerful? Would he be famous? Would 
he be an object of admiration? Would he be 
a wise man, a man of prudence and sagacity ? 
Solomon says, ‘ Let me be wise!’ 

This seems a very commonplace introduction 
to a great life. But is it? It is undramatic, 
no doubt; it is homespun. But what if the 
crisis of national history has shifted from the 
theatre to the home! What if in the transi- 
tion from David to Solomon the drama of 
human life has z¢se/f assumed an undramatic 
garb! What if the possibility of tragic 


issues has begun to lie, not in war of nations, 


SOLOMON THE WISE 285 


not in rise of dynasties, not in political com- 
binations, but just at the fireside and around 
the family hearth! Would not this alter our 
view of the commonplaceness! Would it not 
lead us to reconsider our estimate of the 
Gallery’s introduction to the life of Solomon— 
to ask if, after all, there may not be something 
in this narrative as rich in possible tragedy as 
was the threatening of a deluge, or the resis- 
tance to an Egyptian bondage! 

Now, I am prepared to show that it was so, 
that Solomon’s choice of a profession was 
really one of the most tragic acts of Jewish 
annals—an act on whose decision was sus- 
pended an issue as momentous as ever hung 
on the prayers of Moses or on the sword of 
Joshua. Did you ever ask yourself what is 
the reason that the decision made by Solomon 
is so highly commended? To me the answer 
seems clear. His decision is applauded, not 
mainly because it was a proof of personal 
character, but because it furnished the hope of 
escape from a national danger. If Solomon 
had set his heart either upon riches or upon 


286 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


military glory, there would have been no 
guarantee that the silent mine beneath his 
feet would not explode. For, there was a 
mine beneath his feet. Peaceful as looked the 
scene, calm as were the surroundings, there 
were subterranean fires which one thoughtless 
deed might bring to the surface. There was, 
below the crust of the soil, an underground heat 
which any moment might be fanned into 
flame by a giddy head or an unsteady hand. 
The only security from the warmth below 
was to have absolute coolness above. A hot- 
headed sovereign, a man on the throne ani- 
mated by personal motives, would be certain 
at some point to fire the train. There was 
wanted on the seat of royalty a balanced 
mind, an impersonal mind, a mind in whom 
all private ambitions were subordinated to zeal 
for the common good. Let us consider this 
necessity a little more in detail. 

I said that when David came into the un- 
divided possession of the empire, Israel was 
very much in the position of England after 
the Wars of the Roses. There had been a 


SOLOMON THE WISE 287 


slaughter among the great leaders. The land 
was like a steed that had lost his rider; it was 
moving aimlessly, it was directed nowhere. 
David obtained the supremacy without a 
rival, and he transmitted the kingdom to his 
son. But you will commit a great mistake if 
you imagine that the party of Saul was crushed 
because his house was crushed. I hold very 
strongly that the eleven tribes who followed 
Saul never submitted to David in their hearts, 
Poor Rehoboam gets the credit of having split 
the kingdom into two; I do not believe it 
was ever really one. It was never anything 
more than a patched garment. Judah and 
Benjamin were never truly united. Their 
union was like the assembling together of an 
audience to hear a great preacher. David was 
the preacher. The audience had no bond of 
brotherhood—not even the acceptance of the 
preacher's doctrine. They were kept together 
simply by the spell of a presence, by the power 
of a personality, by the commanding chords of 
a human voice. It wasa frail and impotent 
thread on which to suspend a kingdom! 


288 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


For now the voice of the preacher is still! 
His presence has been withdrawn; another 
stands in the place he used to occupy. David 
is dead, and a man of different mould has 
mounted the rostrum. Will Solomon sway 
the masses as David did? By natural gifts, 
no. The new preacher has not the elements 
of the old. In every respect they are con- 
trasts. David was extemporaneous; Solomon 
is elaborately prepared. David spoke in out- 
bursts; Solomon deals in rounded periods. 
David was unconventional ; Solomon is steeped 
in culture. David appealed to human experi- 
ence; Solomon expounds abstract principles, 
David revealed the man ; Solomon exhibits the 
scholar. David was the sermon; Solomon 
gives the sermon. Clearly, if each is to be 
judged by his natural powers, the second can- 
not keep together the audience of the first. 

To drop the metaphor, young Solomon had 
a problem before him. He had to ask him- 
self the question, How shall I keep this already 
disunited mass from skowzmg its disunion? It 
was clear to him that to effect this he needed 


SOLOMON THE WISE 289 


a very special gift—a gift quite distinct from 
the power of making money, or the brilliancy 
that wins fame. I think, indeed, that the task 
before Solomon was the greatest that can be 
imposed on any king, and that the man who 
performs it deserves to be reckoned amongst 
the greatest of all sovereigns. We are gener- 
ally in a mistake on this matter. We are 
under the impression that to be a king in 
times of open revolution is a more arduous 
thing than to be a king in times of unex- 
pressed dissatisfaction. Itis the reverse. In 
times of open revolution a sovereign requires 
but one power—an adequate army. But when 
the currents are underground, when the 
factions are invisible, inaudible, undefinable, 
when the ferment of discontent is working 
below the surface and the subterranean heat 
is making no sign, he who guides the state 
must have the powers of a prophet. He must 
have the gift of imagination, the gift of in- 
sight, the gift of anticipative sympathy, above 
all, that gift which defies definition—the thing 
called tact. The man who can preserve 
T 


290 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


tranquillity among elements of inward dis- 
cord is every inch a king. 

Now, remember that for nearly forty years 
this was what Solomon did. His is character- 
istically the reign of peace; there is not such 
a period of protracted peace in all the Jewish 
annals. This in itself would not be a matter 
of greatness; there is a calm which comes 
from lethargy—from the absence of vital force. 
But the peace of Solomon’s reign is the peace 
of ariver; it is calm, not through stagnation, 
but through balanced movement. It is a 
peace produced in the midst of natural an- 
archy, in a sphere where elements tend to stand 
apart from one another. It isa result achieved, 
not by the suspension of regal force, but by 
the prolonged operation of that force. The 
spectacle afforded to the eye is one of power 
—of greater power than could be evinced by 
any military conquest. The military conquest 
requires an effort suited to the emergency; 
the preservation of tranquillity amid turmoil 
needs an energy uniform at all times. 


Were I to put the question, Was Queen 


SOLOMON THE WISE 291 


Elizabeth or Charles 1. the greater sovereign ? 
there is not a schoolboy who would not 
answer, ‘Queen Elizabeth.’ But why do we 
hold that the earlier is more worthy of praise 
than the later ruler? Is it because Elizabeth 
was fortunate and Charles was not? No; 
our judgment would be quite the same if 
Charles had won the field of Naseby and 
levelled his enemies with the dust. The merit 
of Elizabeth lies in the fact that under her 
the Revolution never took place. She had 
elements of discord in her kingdom as fierce 
as any which marked the reign of Charles; 
but Charles let them explode, Elizabeth kept 
them quiet. We pronounce Elizabeth the 
greater potentate because her power went 
deeper down than the power of Charles would 
have gone even had it been victorious; it 
could retain an empire in tranquillity when 
everything conspired to make a conflagration. 
Now, I have always felt that there is a strong 
historical parallel between the Portrait of King 
Solomon and the Portrait of Queen Elizabeth. 
I do not know of any twocharacters living at 


292 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


so wide a distance from each other in space 
and time who present such a _ remarkable 
analogy in their public lives. Both had a very 
remote prospect of reaching the thrones which 
they eventually secured. Both attained their 
position through storm and stress. Both came 
to a kingdom in which the democracy had 
been elevated to power through the fall of great 
families. Both ruled over a state thick-sown 
with secret dissensions—a state where hostile 
parties nursed their unspoken jealousies. Both 
for almost an equal period kept down public 
disquiet without any display of authority and 
without any exercise of severity. I am tempted 
to add one parallel more. Both almost at the 
last heard the beginnings of a long-suppressed 
storm—a storm which their successors were 
to hear with appalling clearness; and the 
one reign, like the other, had an evening bereft 
of gold. The marvel in each case is, not that 
the evening should have been dim, but that the 
hours of the day should have continued so long 
bright. Nothing could bea stronger testimony 
to the greatness of either sovereign. 


SOLOMON THE WISE 293 


Turning now exclusively to Solomon, let us 
observe the means adopted by him which, in 
securing this internal tranquillity, succeeded 
so long and so well. And, first of all, I wish to 
direct attention to the fact that his whole life 
is built upon a plan. We are, in my opinion, 
under a widespread misapprehension as to the 
character of Solomon. The popular view is 
that he is the delineation of a double person- 
ality—a life divided between wisdom and folly. 
We picture a man alternating between the 
cares of state and the pleasures of the 
sensualist. We figure him as swayed by two 
opposite impulses—the proclivities of thestates- 
man and the tendencies of the man of idleness; 
and we are disposed to regard the latter as the 
reaction from the former. Now, this is not the 
view I take of the life of Solomon. To me 
he presents the picture of one man. Every 
incident of his life is to my mind the expres- 
sion of one and the same tendency. I do not 
think he ever deviates from his political 
purpose, nor ever forgets it for a moment. 
That he went far astray in his pleasures, that 


294 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


he was not always loyal to his religion, that 
he was unduly prodigal in his expenditure, I 
freely admit. But his errors were political 
errors. They were not moments of reaction 
from state cares; they were themselves part of 
his state policy. That they were mistakes, no 
one will deny; but they were mistakes of the 
king rather than of the man. They were 
committed in the pursuance of his plan of 
statecraft, not in the forgetfulness of it. That 
plan of statecraft never varied in its aim—to 
keep dormant that faction of the kingdom 
which still, with pertinacious loyalty, clung to 
the memory of the house of Saul. 

How was this to be done? One or other of 
two methods was available—the awakening of 
a common danger or the suggestion of a 
common interest. The former has been the 
usual method of kings in the circumstances 
of Solomon; they have sought to purchase 
domestic peace by the incurring of foreign 
war. A nation divided by factions has often 
been driven into unity by the call to arm 


against another nation. It was so with the 


SOLOMON THE WISE 295 


France of 1792; it was so with the Germany 
of 1870. Many a despot has found outside 
war conducive to his indoor peace and has not 
scrupled to strike the match of international 
discord. A foreign irritant has often produced 
a home sedative, and the producing of a sedative 
by this means has often been a policy. It was 
the successful policy of Napoleon the Great ; 
it was the attempted policy of Napoleon the 
Little. But it was not the policy of King 
Solomon. He felt that to cure strife on the 
homeopathic principle was but a poor salva- 
tion—that to heal domestic discord by outdoor 
discord was but a superficial gain. He wanted 
peace all round—peace not only in the inner 
parts, but on the borders and at the gates. 
Accordingly, he chose another way—what 
seemed to him a more excellent way. Reject- 
ing the aid of a common danger, he turned for 
support to a common interest. It seemed to 
him that he could best bind the heart of Judah 
to the heart of Benjamin, that he could best 
reconcile his own tribe with the refractory 
eleven tribes, by presenting to them a positive 


296 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


rather than a negative ground for union. It 
was for this that he strove through all the 
years. His whole reign was an application of 
his principle. Sometimes he chose right 
measures, sometimes wrong; but with the 
principle itself he was never inconsistent. 
There is no side of his character which does 
not, to my mind, bear the stamp of this 
peacemaking design. 

Take the domestic side. Here he is 
decidedly reprehensible. The vast number 
of matrimonial alliances which he personally 
and simultaneously contracted are a disgrace 
to family life; and even for an Eastern 
monarch, they place him in a low moral 
category. Yet I do not believe that their 
dominant motive was sensuality. I think his 
design was that the family of David should 
ramify in as many directions as possible at 
home and abroad. He felt that a common 
interest is greatly promoted by a common 
blood. He felt that nothing would weaken the 
memory of the house of Saul like consanguinity 
to the house of David. he more branches 


SOLOMON THE WISE 207 


the Davidic tree could shoot forth in the land 
of Canaan and the adjacent lands, the more 
would it be endeared to Semitic eyes. This, I 
believe, was the motive, the main motive, which 
lighted the myriad nuptial torches of Solomon. 
His marriages, regular and irregular, had a 
political aim. They were meant to graft his 
blood upon the Hebrew race, to connect that 
race for the future with his name and lineage, 
and to elicit the verdict of the generation yet 
unborn, ‘ The whole land of Israel has a stone 
in the house of David.’ 

Take the commercial side. Here at first 
sight Solomon appears to be the typical money- 
maker, living exclusively for the wealth he can 
gather. He seems to have deserted the choice 
of wisdom for the choice of gold. His ships 
travel the seas in search of merchandise; they 
touch at every port where the spirit of 
commerce dwells. His caravans range the 
land in the service of the trader; they go forth 
with native produce and return with foreign 
treasure. His commercial enterprise extends 
to all regions. It visits Tyre. It reaches 


298 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


Arabia. It treats with Egypt. It has inter- 
course with Babylon. It probably touches the 
shores of India. To outward appearance, the 
whole aim of his life and of his labours is the 
amassing of wealth, the acquisition of personal 
gain. But look deeper, and you will form 
another view. You will come to the conclusion 
that, to his mind, the value lay in the pursuing, 
not in the thing pursued. You will come to 
see that this itself had for him a political 
value. The aim of Solomon, as I take it, was 
to keep the mind of the nation in united 
employment. Civil war would keep men in 
disunited employment. But the battle of 
human industries was a battle which his people 
might all fight side by side. Commercial 
enterprise loomed before the eye of Solomon, 
not so much in the light of a personal gain as 
in the light of a popular attraction. Here was 
an object on which the admirers of the house of 
Saul and the adherents of the house of David 
might unite! Here was a cause in which they 
might work together! Here was at once a 
labour and a pleasure in whose pursuit each 


SOLOMON THE WISE 299 


might forget its wrongs and become the ally 
of the other! And when the result of this 
commercial prosperity should appear, when the 
opulence of the nation should be manifested in 
its magnificent pageants and its splendid build- 
ings, here was a source of common pride to 
Judah and Benjamin, a work whose triumph 
both could claim and whose glory each could 
share! 

But it is on the religious side that the 
wisdom of Solomon is most resplendent. I do 
not, of course, speak of those concessions 
to idolatry which tarnish his later years. I 
believe these to have been mistaken attempts 
at conciliation—things in which the wisdom of 
Solomon failed. But that which exhibits the 
true religious sagacity of this man is the deed 
which is indissolubly associated with his name 
—the building of the temple. Why did he 
build that temple? I think in losing sight of 
the man’s character we have missed the full 
significance of the deed. What was his motive 
for the erection of that stately pile? To 
fulfil a wish of his father? Partly. To satisfy 


300 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


a personal impulse of devotion? Partly. But 
I think neither of these standing alone nor 
both united would have impelled Solomon to 
such a work. Remember that this man was 
before all things a politician. David would 
have built the temple for ‘glory to God in the 
highest’; Solomon required the additional 
motive, ‘Peace on earth; goodwill among 
men.’ What Solomon wanted above all things 
was a bond of national unity. Two rival 
ideals were dividing his empire—the house 
of David and the house of Saul. To the heart 
of Solomon there came the suggestion of a 
third and higher watchword —the house of 
God. Might not the two other houses be 
united in this wzder building! Might not the 
memory of the long feud be made to perish in 
the common effort to inaugurate another king- 
dom, in the co-operation of both parties for 
the construction of a new and glorious palace 
—a palace compared to which the residence 
of a Saul and of a David would alike grow 
dim—a dwelling for the habitation of the King 
of Kings! 


SOLOMON THE WISE | 301 


Can you fail to see how in the building of 
this temple the idea of common co-operation 
occupies so prominent a place! Why are so 
many invited to contribute gifts? Why are 
such numbers solicited to lend a hand? Why 
is the work divided and subdivided between 
so many classes of labourers? Why is there a 
place for those who bear, and a place for those 
who hew, and a place for those who chip? 
Why is there such an enormous number of 
workmen as a hundred and_ eighty-three 
thousand and six hundred in a work pro- 
tracted over seven years? Can there be any 
answer but one? Dowe not see that Solomon 
wants to be engaged in a work which will be 
the work of the nation—of the whole nation 
in all its parts and in all its members. He 
wants his people to be able to say, not only, 
‘Solomon did it,’ but, ‘We all did it with 
Solomon.’ He desires that every representa- 
tive of Jewish life shall have a stone in the 
building. The children shall bring their gifts 
to it; the adults shall bring their hands to it; 
the aged shall bring their prayers to it. The 


302 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


rich shall adorn it with gems; the poor shall 
serve it with their workmanship. The men of 
action shall break stones for it; the men of 
patience shall carry burdens for it; the men 
of taste shall contribute decorations for it. 
The poets shall make its songs; the musicians 
shall weave its memories; the theologians 
shall form its ritual. That is the hope of 
Solomon—the dream of repiecing the rent 
garment. It is the hope that the tribe of 
Judah and the tribe of Benjamin may become 
tributaries to the river of God, that the wars 
sown in a divided empire may be forgotten in 
a united worship, and that the house of Saul 
may be joined to the house of David by that 
mysterious secret passage which runs through 
the house of the Lord. 


ORD, Thou art building a temple greater 
than that of Solomon—the temple of 

the Holy Ghost! Give me a stone in the 
building of that house! Give me a place in 
the work, suited to my soul! If I have many 
places in my soul, give me many duties for 


SOLOMON THE WISE 303 


the temple! In my time of singing, train me 
for its choir! In my time of business, enrich 
me for its maintenance! In my time of health, 
strengthen me to raise its walls! In my time 
of sickness, give me patience to bear its 
burdens! I would bring all my possessions 
of body and mind as subscriptions to the 
building. I bring Thee my gladness for its 
morning hymn. I bring Thee my sadness 
for its evening song. I bring Thee my beauty 
for its adorning. I bring Thee my defects 
for its altar of sacrifice. I bring Thee my 
strength that I may support some part; I 
bring Thee my weakness that some part may 
support me. I bring Thee my moments of 
faith that there may be service by day; I 
bring Thee my moments of doubt that there 
may be service by night. I bring Thee my 
full cup for the hour of thanksgiving; I bring 
Thee my empty cup for the hour of prayer. 
Let all the gates of Thy temple be open to my 
soul,O Lord; for I know not, in life’s revolving, 


before what portal I may need to stand! 


CHAPTER XV 
ELIJAH THE IMPULSIVE 


THERE are three men whom the Bible Gallery 
dissociates from the idea of death—Enoch, 
Moses, and Elijah. Of each of these it is 
virtually declared that no one can picture for 
them a burying-place. Enoch has left no 
record of a closing life; Moses has left no 
trace of a physical decay; Elijah has left no 
sign of an extinguished fire. It is not, I think, 
by accident that the Great Gallery has dis- 
sociated these three forms from the idea of the 
dark valley. These three forms represent three 
qualities which have no historical limit, which 
are found side by side in every age—the spirit, 
the conscience, and the heart. Enoch represents 
the spirit—the craving for Divine communion. 
Moses represents the conscience—the eternal 


law of human duty. Elijah represents the 
804 


ELIJAH THE IMPULSIVE 305 


heart—the power that acts from the impulse 
of the moment. These three phases of mind 
cannot be localised; they are historically 
immortal. We cannot say that spirituality 
belongs to one century, conscience to another, 
impulse to a third. Wecannot even say that 
within the memory of civilised man these 
three have developed. Spinoza is not in 
advance of Plato; Paul is not morally the 
superior of Moses; Luther is not more intense 
than Simon Peter. In all ages of civilised time 
man has exhibited equally these three phases 
—the spiritual, the moral, and the intuitive. 
They have been, within this limit, not only 
deathless, but seemingly changeless. The 
Gallery has proclaimed their immortality. It 
has incarnated each in the person of a separate 
life, and then it has shown us that life standing 
apart from the elements of decay. Enoch has 
no tomb; Moses has no shroud; Elijah has 
no setting to the chariot of his sun. 

There is nothing which localises a man like 
the record of his death. When you announce 
the date of a man’s death, you fix the limit of 

U 


306 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


his personal development in the present world. 
When you announce the date of his marriage, 
or the date of his first publication, you give no 
clue to his ultimate mental standpoint. But 
the inscription on the tombstone is the latest 
possible record concerning the man; it stamps 
indelibly his century upon him; it marks the 
final stretch of his environment. Here lies 
the significance of this record of the Gallery! 
When it shows us Enoch translated, when it 
conceals the body of Moses, when it reveals 
Elijah ascending in his chariot of fire, it 
virtually says: ‘Do not regard these men as 
belonging to a particular century. Look at 
them as symbolising those three phases of 
the human mind which are the same in all 
centuries. View them as embodiments of the 
fact that there are three permanent elements 
in humanity—the devotional, the moral, and 
the instinctive. Consider them as revealers 
of the truth that, whatever e/se may faint or 
grow weary, these three will never die—the 
breathings of the spirit, the commands of the 


conscience, and the impulses of the heart.’ 


ELIJAH THE IMPULSIVE 307 


I have attributed to Elijah the third of these 
positions. I regard him as distinctively the 
man of impulse, the man who is prompted by 
instinctive dictates. His life is one of sudden 
movements, of surprises. He is more like a 
lance than a sword. He does not fence; 
he darts. He breaks forth suddenly from 
the silence, and as suddenly vanishes. Every- 
thing about him is abrupt; his beginning and 
his ending are abrupt. He comes without 
introduction, and he goes without warning. 
He appears before us like Melchizedek—with- 
out father or mother or descent. We see no 
childhood. We discover no home. We recog- 
nise no domestic interest. He comes before 
us as the Christ of St. Mark comes before us— 
full-grown, developed, equipped for his mission. 
He stands forth all at once in the political 
arena. In a moment, in the twinkling of an 
eye, we are confronted by a spectral form 
denouncing idolatry, predicting vengeance. 
Not in the valley does he first appear. We 
see no trace of one who needs to climb. When 
we earliest meet him, it is at the top of the 


308 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


hill. He hurls his rebuke right at the throne. 
Reformers as a rule begin with the masses 
and creep up gradually to the classes. Elijah 
begins at the social summit. He stands in the 
court of Ahab, in the court of Jezebel; our 
first vision of him is in the presence of kings. 
He bursts upon us in full meridian. There 
is no gradation between the depth of silence 
and the blare of trumpets—yesterday he was 
voiceless; to-day he is thunder. It is written 
of John the Baptist, ‘He was in the desert 
till the day of his showing unto Israel.’ That 
could be written of Elijah. His development 
is quite hid from us. There is no boundary 
line between his desert and his glory. We 
do not see him rise; we behold him risen. A 
few minutes ago there was darkness all round ; 
suddenly we are in the presence of a great 
fire whose kindling has been invisible to us, 
and whose origin we do not know. 

It is my opinion that the history of Elijah, 
as recorded in the Great Gallery, is the history 
of all impulsive minds. The course of all such 
minds is a process not of increasing, but of 


ELIJAH THE IMPULSIVE 309 


subsiding flame. I do not mean that they 
ever diminish the actual amount of their heat; 
but they diminish the amount of their heat 
in any one direction. All impulse is at first 
onesided. It sees only a single way —the 
drastic way. It looks at the barren fig-tree 
and says, ‘Cut it down; why cumbereth it 
the ground!’ In after times it loses its haste 
—not from declining zeal, but from increasing 
vision. It sees that there are other ways of 
dealing with the fig-tree—that zeal may be 
intense without being drastic. This, if I mis- 
take not, is the course of Elijah—a gradual 
subsiding from the roar into the whisper. It 
is a voice growing softer, becoming ever more 
calm—not because the heat has lost its passion, 
not because the soul has drooped its wing, but 
because the eye has seen more clearly the hope 
of ultimate success. 

Let us examine this process in the life of 
Elijah—this gradual subsiding of noise. He 
begins most vociferously. Like the Baptist, he 
comes out of his desert and shouts, ‘ Repent!’ 
His motive, however, is different from that of 


310 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


the Baptist. The Baptist denounced loose 
living; Elijah denounces idolatry. The Old 
Testament Prophet is more allied to the 
John who stood before Queen Mary than to 
the John who stood before King Herod. To 
John Knox, indeed, he presents a strong 
parallel. Elijah, like Knox, is the child of 
a Protestant reaction. He appears as the 
champion of a faith which he believes to be 
the primitive faith—the worship of an invisible 
God. Men had sought to worship God in a 
material form, to see Him enshrined in some 
object of human sense. Elijah calls them to 
come back—-back to the forest primeval, back 
to those grounds of Eden where God was 
distinct from the trees of the garden. Elijah is 
the uncompromising Protestant of his time, an 
opponent of the image in the sanctuary. But 
his weapons as yet are purely physical. He 
brings no arguments; he exhibits no reasons, 
The message he delivers is a menace, ‘ Abandon 
your ideals, or die!’ He recognises but one 
force—outward compulsion. ‘You have bowed 
down to idols; you will have drought and 


ELIJAH THE IMPULSIVE 311 


famine!’—that is the burden of his message. 
There is no appeal to philosophy ; there is no 
invitation to a controversy ; there is no attempt 
to exhibit the inherent nature of the sin. There 
is simply a call to arms—a command to ex- 
tirpate those who revered the forms of Nature. 

Elijah, then, displays at the outset the full 
amount of his fire—his fire concentrated ona 
single point. The problem is, how to get that 
fire distributed. We do not wish to see it 
extinguished ; we do not even wish to see it 
reduced ; we want to see it diffused—spread 
in different directions—made less onesided. 
The effect of all onesided emotion is a collapse 
of the man who feels it. It is so with Elijah. 
Where do we next meet with him? In a 
desert place by the side of the brook Cherith. 
What has brought him there? The fear of 
King Ahab, says the Bible student. I do 
not believe it. Has he not just been in the 
presence of Ahab, bearding him to the face, 
denouncing his idolatry, proclaiming his retri- 
bution! If Elijah had been a timid man, then 
was the time for fear. Could you imagine a 


312 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


man who braved Ahab to his face running 
off in terror when Ahab had turned his back! 
No—not in terror. But I could imagine him 
doing so in physical prostration. In fact, no 
other explanation can be given. Why should 
this brave, bold man, who had met the hour 
of danger with unblanched cheek, be found, 
when the crisis was past, lurking in a desolate 
spot by the brook Cherith! It can only be 
accounted for by nerve-exhaustion —by the 
process of reaction from strong emotion. 
Elijah at the brook Cherith is an illustration 
of that principle which has ruled in all minds 
of onesided impulse. If he had been divided 
between anger and sorrow and pity, he would 
have experienced no mental reaction; the 
alternations of feeling would have saved him 
from collapse. But he abandoned himself to 
a single impulse, and the inevitable result was 
the prostration at the waters of Cherith. 

And now I have to observe that this re- 
action was the finest training which the man 
could possibly have received. It gave him 
his first lesson in something he had much 


ELIJAH THE IMPULSIVE 313 


need to learn—the superiority of mental force 
to material force. He had been conquering 
Ahab by physical strength; but immediately 
afterwards he is himself conquered by a 
silently-working influence—a power impalp- 
able to sense, independent of weapons. He 
has been prostrated by a process working 
quicker than famine, quicker than drought, 
quicker than pestilence — prostrated by the 
very sweep of his own mental energy. Was 
not this a message to his soul that he had 
mistaken the comparative strength of the 
natural forces! Did it not say to him that 
he had chosen the least powerful agency 
when he selected drought and famine as the 
ministers of God! Did it not tell him that 
he should have appealed to the mzud of Ahab 
—that he should have tried to exhibit rather 
the inner than the outer majesty of God! 
Elijah was to be taught that the best cure 
for idolatry was not the exhibition of the 
Divine hand, but the exhibition of the Divine 
heart, that God was better than the idol, not 
because He could break the idol, but because 


314. THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


He could give what the idol could not—help 
in the day of trouble. 

Elijah, then, must be taught that the highest 
glory of true religion, and what distinguishes 
it from false religion, is its power to minister. 
And this, by the brook Cherith, is God’s lesson 
to his soul. The ravens unconsciously bring 
him food. Unable in the famine to find grain, 
they bear to the spot the bodies of animals 
which they have slain, and deposit them there 
for their future use. Elijah inherits the fruit 
of their labours. He appropriates the spoil 
they have gathered; but he regards them as 
his unconscious almoners. Yet, by his country- 
men the raven had always been deemed an 
unholy thing. It was ill-omened. The lamb, 
the dove, and the goat were objects of Divine 
association ; the raven was not—men did not 
present it in sacrifice. But here God presents 
it in sacrifice—tells Elijah to receive it as His 
minister. And then there comes a strange 
call to Elijah which perhaps I may be allowed 
to paraphrase: ‘Elijah, there are better modes 
of teaching My service than breaking and 


ELIJAH THE IMPULSIVE 315 


bruising. You have been ministered unto by 
creatures which you deem unholy; will not 
you minister unto such! If I can make sacri- 
legious things My instruments, shall you be 
afraid to touch them! Will you not best 
conquer them by showing them the beauty of 
holiness! Come, and I will tell you how to 
show the beauty of holiness to one of those 
whom you call sacrilegious. There is a widow 
in great want in the country of Tyre and 
Sidon. She is beyond the boundaries of your 
land. She belongs to a heathen population, 
She worships Me not after the pattern of your 
fathers. But she has a body of like passions 
with you. She has felt the hunger which you 
have felt—the hunger which the ravens have 
fed. Go, and minister to her as the ravens 
have ministered to you! You will reveal to 
her the power of your God more clearly by 
that deed than by all the storms of denuncia- 
tion and all the instruments of destruction.’ 
Do we not see that the aim of this call is 
to broaden Elijah—to lead him to the belief 
that the absence of true religion is not so 


316 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


much something to be punished with famine as 
something which proves famine to be already 
there. He is to be made to feel that the man 
or woman so afflicted is primarily an object, 
not of anger, but of pity. He is to be led to 
realise that the subjects of this malady are 
experiencing a sense of want, and therefore 
are objects of charity rather than marks for 
vengeance. That is the reason why every 
stage of Elijah’s course is a humbling stage. 
He is constantly met by some privation ; 
every morning of hope is followed by a night 
of despair. Why so, we are inclined to ask; 
why should God obstruct the missionary 
work of His servant? Simply because the 
obstruction of the work is, in his case, the 
advancement of the man. What he needs to 
know, above all things, is the sense of want— 
the sympathy with human weakness. He has 
been born with too much independence in his 
heart. His native instinct is towards self- 
reliance. What he deems easy he thinks 
everybody should deem easy. The lesson he 
needs from life is an experience of individual 


ELIJAH THE IMPULSIVE 317 


feebleness. Elijah is the natural opposite of 
David. David had conflicting currents in him, 
and therefore he felt weak ; Elijah had origin- 
ally only one current, and therefore he felt 
strong. The aim of the Almighty is to send 
new currents through him, and soto make him 
feel more conflict. He is not humanitarian 
enough, because he is not near enough to the 
ground. He does not make allowance for 
human frailty, because he is too confident of 
himself. He must be taught self-distrust, that 
he may learn the needs of Man. The greatest 
convert made by Elijah’s mission was to be— 
Elijah. 

Not all at once did this conversion come; 
it was gradual. When next the curtain rises, 
he is already in some measure liberalised. 
He consents to meet the idolaters at an 
CEcumenical Council on Mount Carmel. That 
was a large concession from a man of his 
uncompromising spirit. This was not the 
method in which he had first met Ahab. 
Then he had allowed zo discussion; he had 
simply said, ‘Accept the doctrine or receive 


318 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


the scourge!’ Now it is othervise. He 
proposes a test of truth—a mental t.:t—the 
comparative power of prayer. Let us try, he 
says, which of our prayers will impart most 
fire to life! That was a fair field of battle; 
what can be a better test of religion than its 
power to impart vital fire! It was a field on 
which Elijah was sure to win. No unspiritual 
worship is ever kindling; love alone can 
illuminate the commonway. Elijah triumphed 
in the argument; he showed what on his side 
had been wrought by prayer. It would have 
been well had he rested with that victory. 
But the militant instinct was not dead within 
him. The meeting closed in bloodshed. 
What happened I do not exactly know; the 
Picture in the Gallery leaves something to the 
imagination. I suppose that Elijah, heated by 
his new kind of triumph, harangued the crowd 
and rhetorically called upon his countrymen 
to root out from among them these corrupters 
of the national faith. I suppose that the 
crowd, mistaking rhetoric for prose, and inter- 
preting the exhortation to extirpate a principle 


ELIJAH THE IMPULSIVE 319 


as the command to slay its adherents, rushed 
frantically and tumultuously on the prophets 
of Baal and gave them the crown of martyr- 
dom. That Elijah designed the deed, I do 
not believe; that he regretted it, I firmly hold. 
Yet it was the fruit of his onesided passion, and 
it brought a dark night to close a bright day. 
The martyrdom he had given to Baal was 
indeed a crown; violence always helps the 
cause on which it tramples. The clamours of 
the land rose against Elijah. To a man con- 
scious of the justice of his deed this would 
have been little; but Elijah’s inner man rose 
against Azmse/f. The prophet of God fled. 
From whom did he flee? Was it from Ahab? 
Was it from Jezebel? Was it from the friends 
of the martyred men of Baal? No; it was 
from his own inner man. Elijah saw his other 
self—the self that was bound for heaven. It 
was as yet only a child; but it made him 
tremble. It shook his nerves; it paralysed his 
self-confidence. He ran to escape the child, 
but the child ran with him; the child was his 
angel sent from God. He ran to Beersheba; 


320 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


he found the child at Beersheba. He fled into 
the Arabian desert; he met the child there. 
He lay down to die, under a juniper tree; the 
child sustained him. He came to Horeb and 
hid himself in a mountain cave; the child 
suddenly became full-grown, and Elijah 
recognised his true self. 

For now there bursts upon his view a 
wondrous vision—the vision of his own life; 
and, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, 
he finds that he has been on the wrong way. 
He hears a roaring wind; he says, ‘Is it Thou, 
Lord ?’—there is no answer. He feels a 
trembling of the earth; he says, ‘Is it Thou, 
Lord ?’—there is no answer. He sees a ball 
of fire shot into the air; he says, ‘ Is it Thou, 
Lord ?’—there is no answer. He catches the 
sound of a still, small voice, so low that he can 
hardly detect it; he says, ‘Is it Thou, Lord?’ 
—and the answer comes, ‘ It is I.’ 

Could anything more completely reveal the 
plan of the Gallery in delineating the figure of 
Elijah! The design is popularly thought to 
be the exhibition of a physical heroism, It is 


ELIJAH THE IMPULSIVE 321 


the reverse. It is the exhibition of a process 
by which a great soul was made meet for 
heaven by altering its ideal of heroism from 
the physical to the mental. The plan of the 
Picture is to reveal a work of transition—a 
work in which the original mountain became 
a valley and the original valley became a 
mountain. In the cave of Horeb the transi- 
tion was complete. The old Elijah was buried 
there, and the new Elijah emerged full-grown. 
The child had conquered the man and left his 
body in the cave; the still, small voice had 
triumphed over the wind, the earthquake, and 
the fire. Henceforth I see a change in Elijah, 
His alternations of hope and despair have 
vanished, and in their room there has come 
an equable calm. He is more trustful in 
adversity; he is more merciful in prosperity. 
His later denunciations are rather against 
inhumanity to Man than against errors in creed 
or ritual. He avenges, and rightly avenges, 
the wrongs of Naboth; but, for the first time 
in the record of his life, his vengeance is mixed 
with leniency—a leniency all the more remark- 
x 


220 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


able because it was exercised towards his 
consistent and inveterate enemy, Ahab. No 
man can resist the conclusion that the Elijah 
who emerges from the cave of Horeb is an 
altered being. He is no longer a flaming 
sword; he is a human voice—wakened by 
human sympathies, tuned by human feelings, 
He has been made more fit to meet Moses on 
the Mount; the power of action has been 
joined to the power of waiting. 

The working of this change was doubtless 
mainly from within. But it was not wholly so. 
That voice in the cave of Horeb said many 
things; but it said one thing which, to my 
mind, was specially helpful to the future 
development of Elijah—it directed him where 
to find a human friend. If there was one 
thing Elijah needed to mellow him, it was 
that! _He seems. never to have felt the 
influence of home ties. We read of no brother 
or sister; we hear of no wife or child. His 
life throughout had been one of war, of public 
commotion, of political and religious strife. 


Superiors he had, inferiors he had; but, so far 


ELIJAH THE IMPULSIVE 325 


as I know, he had hitherto possessed no equals. 
There had been no comrade of his heart, no 
companion of his soul, none to take his hand 
and say, ‘We are brothers.’ A man in such a 
position is in want of one-half of life’s music. 
Was it not well to send him the friend Elisha! 
When the voice sent him to Elisha, it sent him 
to a new school—a school in which he would 
meet a kindred mind and experience at the 
last those ties of human sympathy to which 
the days of his actual childhood had been 
strangers. There, in the companionship of 
Elisha, we will for the present leave him— 
ripening for a higher destiny and preparing for 
enrolment in a loftier band than the prophets 


of ancient Israel. 


THANK Thee, O Lord, that to Elijah and 

to me Thou hast revealed a new and better 
way. I thank Thee that the still, small voice has 
taken the place of the wind, the earthquake, 
and the fire. I used to think that /aw would 
redeem Thy world, I thought that stern 


324 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


penalties would repress the course of crime. I 
thought the thunders of Sinai would make the 
sinner pure. I thought the vision of the lake 
that burneth with fire and brimstone would 
put out the love of evil. Thou hast taught me 
better, O my Father! Thou hast taught me 
that the love of evil can only be extinguished 
by another love. My heart cannot be con- 
quered by the hand. If it is centred on 
the Prince of Evil, it will not be cured by 
the zmprisonment of that prince; I should love 
him in his prison, I should love him in his 
bonds. If I am to cease loving him, I must 
have a mew prince—the Prince of Peace. 
Send me this new Prince, O my Father; 
nothing but Christ will put out Barabbas from 
my heart! I love wrongly, but none the less do 
I love intensely; nothing but axother love will 
set me free. Famine will not; Carmel will 
not; wind and earthquake and fire will not; 
the burning lake itself would not extinguish 
my love! Therefore, my Father, let me love 
again, let me love anew! Send into my heart 
a fresh ideal! Send me a sight of the 


ELIJAH THE IMPULSIVE 325 


‘altogether lovely’! Send me a vision of the 
‘chief among ten thousand’! Send me a 
picture of Him who is ‘ fairer than the children 
of men’! Break the old ideal by the vision of 
a higher beauty! Let my night fade in Thy 
morning, my thorn vanishin Thy flower! One 
leaf of Thy summer’s bloom will disenchant 
me of the winter’s charm. The idols will be 
‘broken in the temple of Baal’ when I see Thy 
King ‘on the holy hill of Zion.’ 


CHAPTER XVI 
ELISHA THE IMITATIVE 


AS I pause before the figure of Elisha, perhaps 
the thought suggested to a bystander will be, 
Why do you make ¢hzs a representative man! 
Is not the most distinctive feature about him 
just his want of originality! Is he not almost 
a direct copy of the form and face of Elijah— 
so direct that, if there were no name inscribed 
below the Picture, we should deem it simply 
a second likeness by an inferior hand! If so, 
why /inmger over the second delineation! We 
have seen the fire in the eye of the master ; 
why pause to describe in the disciple the same 
eye without the fire! Should we not be better 
employed if we passed to fresh woods and 
pastures new! 


Let me admit at once that the parallel zs 
326 


oe 


ELISHA THE IMITATIVE 27 


striking—far too striking to be the result of 
accident or unconscious workmanship. Elijah 
and Elisha are twin figures—what the one 
does, the other does. Their lives are set to 
the same music; the latter is the refrain of the 
former sung by a weaker voice and tuned toa 
slower measure. Does Elijah smite the waters 
of Jordan; Elisha does so too. Does Elijah 
ascend Mount Carmel; Elisha does so too. 
Do the words of Elijah cause a bloody tragedy; 
the words of Elisha do so too. Is Elijah 
appealed to in times of drought ; Elisha is so 
too. Does Elijah multiply a widow’s store; 
Elisha does so too. Does Elijah raise a 
widow’s son; Elisha raises one too. Does 
Elijah carry his beneficence beyond the con- 
fines of Judaism; Elisha does so too—if the 
one ministers to a woman of Zarephath, the 
other cures the captain of a Syrian band. 
Finally, does Elijah in his last earthly moments 
hear the triumphant cry, ‘ The chariots of Israel 
and the horsemen thereof ;’ Elisha in Azs last 
earthly moments listens to the same sound, 
and experiences at the hour of death what 


328 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


his master had experienced at the hour of 
ascension. 

If, then, I admit this remarkable parallel, if 
I regard Elisha as a designed imitation of 
Elijah, why do I not pass him by asa repetition 
of old material? It is because this imitation 
of character is itself in the Old Testament 
Gallery a new and unique thing. I do not 
know whether it has occurred to any one that 
the relation of Elisha to Elijah supplies a 
desideratum in the Gallery. Amongst the 
figures of this collection I look in vain for any 
evidence of that community of mind which in 
the New Testament is called fellowship. Up 
to this point we have not found in these studies 
two men who have been united by similarity 
of spirit. The one has rather been the comp/le- 
ment of the other, has supplied what was 
lacking in the other. Isaac has little likeness 
to Abraham; Joseph moves in a different 
sphere from Jacob; Solomon has few points in 
common with David. Joshua may be called 
the disciple of Moses, but only in a figurative 
sense. Heis more a servant than a son; he 


ELISHA THE IMITATIVE 329 


carries out his orders, but he does not stand 
with him on the Mount. The truth is, kindred 
sympathy is avery rare thing to get. Personal 
liking —the feeling that subsisted between » 
David and Jonathan—is very easily acquired ; 
but the congruity of thought, the identity of 
experience, which made the bond between 
Elisha and Elijah—that is something which is 
never acquired at all; the germ of it must be 
born in each soul. To exhibit this double 
portion of one experience is a work which may 
well absorb the interest of the religious artist. 

This, then, is a case of intellectual friendship 
which is unique in the Old Testament Gallery. 
I have said that in germ Elisha must have had 
from birth the spirit of Elijah. But the ques- 
tion occurs, To which of the Elijahs was he 
allied? We have seen that there were two— 
that one died in the cave of Horeb, and that 
the other came out of the cave full-grown. 
Elisha never saw the first ; his personal contact 
was with the second, The second Elijah, the 
Elijah who emerged from the cave, was of 
a gentler nature than the first ; he had aban- 


330 ##THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


doned for the still, small voice the wind, the 
earthquake, and the fire. Elisha was by nature 
allied to this /ater Elijah. God had given 
him a tender heart, a heart of love. When first 
we meet with him, it is in the circle of family 
life; and we have evidence that his ties of 
home were dear. Elijah finds him at the 
plough and calls him to quit the world for the 
prophetic sanctuary. He asks to be allowed 
to bid his father and mother goodbye. 
And that goodbye is a fine revelation of 
character. He makes a feast to his old friends. 
He wants them to understand that he has not 
parted with them in anger, has not left the 
world because the grapes are sour or the 
vintage bad. When a man is going abroad, 
we often give him a parting dinner to wish 
him well. But if a man going abroad gives us 
a parting dinner, the act has a still deeper 
significance. It says that, however prosperous 
he may be in the new country, he wishes it to 
be understood that the old land will still be 
dear to his heart. He says, in effect, I do not 
leave you through disgust; I do not quit you 


ELISHA THE IMITATIVE 331 


through disapproval ; I do not say that it is bad 
for you to remain; I part from your world 
not in a blast of anger, but in a flood of joyous 
memories which, even while it bears me away, 
repeats the echoes from my native shore. 
Elisha, then, even in the hour of his election, 
is no ascetic. He brings to Elijah a human 
heart. It was the latest and the best gift 
Elijah had ever received—a pure earthly 
friendship. Elisha gave him his heart, his 
whole heart, his unrestrained heart. I cannot 
too strongly emphasise this point ; it is some- 
thing unique in the Old Gallery. Men had 
hitherto come to God through a crucifixion of 
their human nature. They had approached 
Mount Sinai with fear and trembling; they 
had drawn near the burning bush with un- 
covered feet. But Elisha comes unshorn of his 
humanity. He comes to the Divine Presence 
in the dress of a man, with the heart of a man. 
He is drawn to the heavenly Father by the 
love of an earthly drother. He is not ashamed, 
from the very outset, to lean upon a human 
arm. This utilising of earthly help remains 


332 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


his characteristic through life; it colours every 
sphere through which he moves, I will take 
four of these spheres—the moral, the intellec- 
tual, the zesthetic, and the practical. We shall 
find, I think, in each, abundant material for 
reflection and abundant sources of suggestion. 

The first illustration of Elisha’s tendency to 
use secular help is in his moral choice. His 
master, Elijah. has a premonition of his own 
early removal. He asks the disciple what 
mark of his favour he would like best to receive 
as a parting gift. Elisha answers, ‘Let a 
double portion of thy spirit be upon me!’ 
By ‘a double portion’ I understand ‘a repeated 
portion—a repetition of your own experience.’ 
It is the request for a token of human love. 
He does not wish the grace of God to be for 
him a supernatural thing. He wants to be like 
some one whom he loves, and whom he loves 
on account of his goodness, Is not Christianity 
the selfsame prayer on a higher plane. Is it 
not simply the wish that in our hearts the 
grace of God would assume the likeness of one 
whom we love—the Man Christ Jesus. Like 





ELISHA THE IMITATIVE 333 


Elisha, we cannot worship an abstract grace. 
We must see it embodied if we are to love it. 
Our desire to be clothed in it must be the 
desire to be clothed in the likeness of one who 
was deartous. St. John was animated by a 
human love of Jesus; therefore he does not 
say, ‘When He shall appear we shall be good,’ 
but, ‘When He shall appear we shall be like 
Him.’ 

That Elisha’s aspiration was the request for 
a token of love is confirmed by Elijah’s 
_ answer, ‘Thou hast asked a great thing; 
nevertheless, if thou see me when I am taken 
from thee, it will be so unto thee; if not, it 
shall not be so.’ He says that whether his 
disciple’s desire be or be not granted is a 
question that can only be tested by Elisha’s 
future remembrance. Separated from the 
figurative envelope which contains them, his 
words amount to this: ‘The test of a kindred 
spirit is sight in absence. Can you sustain 
that test? Can you see me when I am taken 
up? Can you feel the power of my presence 
when that presence is no longer with you? 


334. THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


Can you be impelled by my influence when 
I have withdrawn my hand? Can I be a 
motive to your life when I have ceased to be 
in touch with it? If so, then you have indeed 
received into your soul a duplicate of my 
image! You have proved your possession of 
a kindred nature; you have maintained your 
right to wear my mantle!’ 

Remember that the test proposed by Elijah 
is also the test proposed by a greater than 
Elijah. What else does Christ mean by the 
parable of a man going into a far country and 
bidding his servants work till his return. It 
is to ascertain whether they are fit for the 
mantle, whether they have received his spirit. 
The test of that will be their power to think 
of his presence in his absence, to feel as if he 
were near when he is faraway. The evidence 
of the disciple’s communion with Christ is 
identical with Elisha’s evidence for his com- 
munion with Elijah; it is the ‘seeing him who 
is invisible,’ the bending to an influence which 
is not manifested either to the eye or to the 
ear or to the hand, Elisha saw Elijah after he 


eae 


ELISHA THE IMITATIVE 335 


was taken up, the disciples worshipped Jesus 
after the cloud had received Him out of their 
sight ; in both cases it was an evidence that 
the mantle had descended. 

Elisha, then, was helped to the grace of 
God by a human love; and that human love 
abode with him long after its object had been 
hid from his outward sight. It is the first 
instance of the kind we have met with in the 
Great Gallery ; but it has been the forerunner 
of many similar experiences. There are 
hundreds whose belief in God sprang at first 
from belief in Man. There are hundreds 
who have given their allegiance to the Divine 
by fixing their eye upon some beauty in the 
human. There are hundreds who, like Elisha, 
have served the God whom they have zo¢ seen 
simply because they have loved the brother 
whom they fave seen. This old Painting is 
not superannuated, not dead. It is living 
breathing, vitalising. It is mirrored in myriad 
lives ; itis reproduced in countless experiences ; 
it is a picture vhich is not Jewish nor Greek 


nor Roman, but human, It expresses, not the 


336 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


bias of a nation, but an instinct of the heart ; 
and therefore its colours are not dimmed 
by time—they are as fresh and vivid to-day as 
they were in the streets of ancient Israel. 

The second illustration of Elisha’s secular 
attitude will be found in the intellectual 
sphere. He has been left alone; the master 
whom he loved has passed into the silent land. 
Elisha has no doubt that he has been trans. 
lated into heaven; he is as sure of that as he 
is of his own existence. But Elisha is a pro- 
fessor in a college. He has the Chair of 
Apologetics—the direction of what was then 
called‘ The School of the Prophets.” He has 
a host of young men who listen to his instruc- 
tions, and for whose training he is responsible. 
These young men are tinged with the spirit of 
a new age—an age of rationalism. They are 
very unwilling to admit a miracle. They 
are eager to reduce everything to natural 
causes. They propose to subject the belief 
in Elijah’s ascension to scientific experts. 
They suggest that his chariot may have been 
one of the wild blasts of the desert. Instead 





ELISHA THE IMITATIVE 337 


of being taken to heaven, he may have been 
carried to the summit of some hill, where he 
may be lying bruised and broken. Will not 
Elisha allow a search to be made. Instead of 
cherishing a mystical exaltation, will he not 
let fifty strong men go forth in search of the 
vanished prophet. If they should find him, it 
would be the death of sentiment, but it might 
produce a result which would prove more 
valuable than any sentiment—the preserva- 
tion of a physical life. 

At first Elisha said, No; but afterwards he 
said, Yes. That saying ‘Yes’ is to my mind 
one of the finest things in old literature. 
Why does he say ‘Yes’? Is it because he 
has any doubt of the truth of his first impres- 
sion? He has no doubt. But he has cast 
himself down from his own pinnacle; he 
has put himself in the place of his students; 
he has tried to live in the experience of those 
who have less strong faith than himself. He 
feels that he has Elijah for his model. Did 
not Elijah hold a council for research on 
Mount Carmel—Elijah who needed no investi- 

Y 


338 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


gation, no argument. Should the disciple be 
above his master. Might not he, Elisha, do 
what was virtually done by the prophet of fire. 
If his master could sink himself to help 
idolaters, might not 4e sink himself for the 
sake of his own students. Should he not go 
down to them who were as yet unable to come 
up to hzm. 

Now, I say this was grand in Elisha. If 
all his prophetic powers should come to be 
ignored, he ought to live by this deed alone. 
It was the best lesson he ever gave to his 
students—this accommodation to their intel- 
lectual need. It is a lesson for professors as 
well as students. I would say to a teacher: 
Never force your certainty upon your pupil. 
Borrowed convictions are of no value. Com- 
mand not assent to former testimonies—not 
even to the authority of your own vision. Let 
‘the pupil search for Elijah. Let him seek 
him on every hill; let him inquire for his 
steps in every valley. Lend him all facilities 
for the search. Open every avenue; unlock 
every gate; clear every barrier that would 





a ee ee ee 


ELISHA THE IMITATIVE 339 


impede his way. At the end of many days he 
may reach by climbing the height which you 
have gained by a moment on the wing. 

The third of those spheres in which Elisha 
leans upon material help in the things of 
Divine grace is the esthetic region—the 
attempt to exhibit the beauties of holiness. 
Elisha has gone to meet three kings. It is a 
period of political emergency, and they have 
summoned him into their presence to ask his 
counsel, Elisha is impressed with the august 
character of his audience. He wishes to speak 
well. He is not only desirous to do his duty 
in the sight of God, but to magnify his office 
in the sight of Man. He has the feeling 
which belongs to every popular preacher—the 
wish to produce an esthetic effect upon his 
hearers; and it is a feeling which is quite 
compatible with the most earnest religious 
devotion. Accordingly, he wishes to rise to 
the occasion. In order to do so, he would 
like the aid of a stimulus. The stimulus he 
selects is music. ‘Bring me a minstrel!’ he 
says. He feels that he would speak better if 


340 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


he has a pleasant environment; he evokes 
the aid of nature to help him in the sphere of 
grace. 

Now, this is a very startling thing. We 
all admit the power of natural beauty in the 
region of natural work. That a poet is 
helped by a sunbeam, that a literary style 
is influenced by fair surroundings, that 
imagination is stimulated by a starry night or 
quickened by a mountain view—all this is 
universally accepted. But in the sphere of 
grace we are apt to think such helps super- 
fluous. We are apt to believe that the Spirit 
of God is a solitary agent acting by its own 
strength and conquering by its own power. 
We think of the beauties of holiness as ¢hem- 
selves sufficient to inspire. Shall the heavenly 
manna seek an ally in the earthly music! 
Shall the hand of God work in unison with 
the harp of man! Shall the soul be aided 
to its vision of Divine glory by listening to 
the strains of a purely human melody, and 
thrilling to the notes of an instrument with 


mundane strings! 


ELISHA THE IMITATIVE 341 


Elisha says, Yes; he calls for a minstrel 
before prophesying. The minstrel was pro- 
bably a man vastly inferior to himself, and 
was perhaps not a religious man at all; yet 
Elisha was not ashamed to use him for the 
service of God. Was he here again influenced 
by the memory of Elijah, by the tendency to 
imitate his master? Did he remember how 
that master was fed by ravens? Did he 
remember how the mightiest was supported 
by the ministration of the meanest? Did he 
remember how the mere secular forces of life 
had been made to serve the kingdom of God? 
I think it likely. Elisha must have felt that 
if the tempestuous soul of his master could be 
content to be fed by earthly streams, the quiet 
river of his own life might well be thus satis- 
fied too. At all events, he was content. He 
was satisfied to sun himself in a worldly 
beauty, to cheer himself into the work for 
God by a study of the work of man, In his 
moment of spiritual exhaustion he sought a 
secular stimulus. At a time when he had 
nothing to draw with, be let a Samaritan 


342 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


bring the pitcher. In the hour when his 
alabaster box was broken, he allowed his 
costliest treasures to be carried in earthen 
vessels. 

And the Christian Church has followed the 
example of Elisha. The voice of that Church 
has ever increasingly been, ‘Bring me a 
minstrel!’ She began wzthout the ministrel— 
in the humble precincts of an upper room. 
But she found that she needed stimulus. She 
was marching as an army to battle, and, like 
an army marching to battle, she required a 
blast of music. Christianity has ascended the 
hill to the tune of trumpets on the plain ; the 
feet of the Christian soldier have moved in 
unison with the measure of an earthly melody. 
The religion of the Cross has proceeded up 
the Dolorous Way crowned with the flowers 
of the world’s field. It has availed itself of 
every secular aid. It has beautified the places 
of its worship. It has imparted human graces 
to its heavenly services. It has cultivated by 
natural art the voices of its choristers. It 
has sent its prophets to drink at the wells of 


ELISHA THE IMITATIVE 343 


worldly wisdom. It has given a literary form 
to its liturgies. It has incorporated with its 
psalmody the sentiments of men mof called 
inspired. When we see the Christian Church 
ascending, we cry with Elisha, ‘The chariots 
of Israel and the horsemen thereof!’ but we 
feel that the chariots and the horsemen belong 
to different worlds—that the horsemen are of 
heaven, the chariots of earth. 

I come now to the fourth of these spheres 
in which Elisha allies himself to the secular; 
it is the practical sphere—the sphere of the 
physician. The incident to which I allude is 
the healing of Naaman the Syrian. He isa 
leper, and he repairs to Elisha in the hope of 
acure. Elisha tells him to bathe seven times 
in the waters of Jordan. Naaman is incensed ; 
he thinks the prophet has insulted him. Why 
so? Myriads of sermons have been written 
on the subject; and the prevailing note of all 
has been that Naaman was offended by the 
simplicity of the proposed remedy. Do you 
think that likely! If I go to a doctor, expect- 
ing to be prescribed a drastic operation, and 


344 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


if I am told instead simply to bathe in cold 
water, am I not likely rather to congratulate 
myself than to feel angry! Naaman himself 
says in the narrative that he would have been 
content with something much more simple— 
a mere touch of the prophet’s hand. The 
sting lay in the fact that the prophet himself 
took no fart in the cure. He handed Naaman 
over to the powers of Nature—to the waters 
of Jordan. Naaman wanted to be the subject 
of a supernatural influence—to be directly 
favoured by the emissary of the God of Israel. 
That emissary, instead of calling in mysterious 
helps, instead of engaging in prayer or in- 
dulging in incantations, sent him to a bathing 
establishment and told him to continue his 
attendance there until the cleansing process 
was complete. Naaman very naturally felt 
that he might have found such institutions 
nearer home. The entire ground of his anger 
lay in the knowledge that Elisha was not 
eager to be thought the agen¢ in the cure, 
that, instead of being proud to have so 
august a patient, he had calmly handed him 


ELISHA THE IMITATIVE 345 


over to the care of one of his assistant 
physicians—to the medical skill of the waters 
of Jordan, 

What to Naaman was a source of anger is 
to us a source of satisfaction; we are glad 
that Elisha, when he sought the help of God, 
sought it through the channels of Nature— 
that he claimed the secular forces as workers 
of the Divine will. But I think that here, as 
elsewhere, Elisha was influenced by that per- 
sonal memory which had been his constant 
guide. Why does he send Naaman to the 
waters of Jordan? Was it not because these 
waters embodied the latest memory of him 
whom he loved—that memory which had im- 
parted to Elisha himself a healing touch in 
every hour of weariness, and had inspired him 
with fresh strength amid the burden and heat 
of the day. It was on the banks of Jordan that 
he had gazed on Elijah almost for the last time; 
it was on the banks of Jordan that he had seen 
his very last act of power. It was love’s latest 
image in his soul. In sending Naaman to 
Jordan, he felt that he was sending him to 


346 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


Elijah. He was putting him in hands that 
were mightier than his own. He was evoking 
the spirit of his departed friend to help his 
healing work, nay, to be the sole agent in that 
work. He says, in effect,‘I commit this man 
into thy hands; thou who hast smitten the 
waters of Jordan, smite, wpon these waters, the 
leprosy of Naaman!’ From first to last the 
spirit of Elijah had remained his guiding star. 
It had spoken to him from the silent land. 
He had dedicated everything to its memory, 
toits example. To that memory he dedicated 
the waters of Jordan too. They were, to him, 
sparkling with the sunset of yesterday, and he 
sent the leper Naaman to be partaker of their 
beams. 


THANK Thee, O Father, that in the 
Pictures of the Great Gallery there is a 
memorial to human friendship—to the love of 
two human souls. I thank Thee that Thou 
hast suffered Elisha to be swayed by the 
memory of a departed friend; it is Thine own 


ELISHA THE IMITATIVE 347 


imprimatur on the sacredness of earthly love. 
I thank Thee that Thou hast allowed my heart 
to wear the mantle of the departed. Thou 
hast not forced me to think of the chariots 
and horsemen that have borne him away. 
Thou hast permitted me to picture my Elijah 
in the old scenes. Thou hast allowed me to 
figure him on the heights of Carmel and on 
the banks of Jordan. Thou hast suffered me 
to hear his footsteps on my earthly way-—to 
be guided by his example, to be inspired by 
his remembrance. Why hast Thou not bid 
me forget? Why hast Thou not told Elisha 
to think of his own way and let his friend 
rest behind the veil? Why hast Thou coun- 
selled him to look up and see if any mantle 
from his vanished friend is falling? Is it not 
to tell him, to tell me, that love is eternal! 
Is it not to tell me that the chariot of fire 
cannot part human friendships! Is it not to 
tell me that the fire of death cannot burn up 
the mantle of earthly influence! Often in the 
vision of departing chariots I am complaining 
of the waste of life. I see men taken up before 


348 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


their work is done, and I weep for their un- 
finishedness, Teach me by this scene in the 
Great Gallery that Elijah can finish his work 
from deyond the grave! Teach me that the 
box of ointment is sot wasted when it is 
broken! Teach me that the fragrance can 
fill the house when the fragments are on the 
floor! Teach me that a departed life may 
hold in my heart an empire which no present 
life can claim! So shall I learn the immor- 
tality of love! 


CHAPTER XVII} 
JOB THE PATIENT 


THE Portrait of Job has been attributed to 
every date between the extremes of a thou- 
sand years—from the call of Abraham to the 
calling back of Judah’s bondage. My own 
opinion is that it dates from the Persian period, 
I think that an artist of that day delineated 
the facts of a real historic tradition; but I be- 
lieve that he used them to express an allegory. 
Job is to me not merely an individual; he is 
that and something more. He is the per- 
sonification of the Jewish race in captivity. 
Through the personality of Job the artist aims 
to show that the afflictions of his people ought 
not to be attributed to any special sin, and 


1 This chapter is an abstract of my Murtle Lecture delivered 
in the Mitchell Hall, Aberdeen University, on December 15, 
1g0I. 

349 


350 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


that the exile they have been doomed to bear 
may itself have been a part of their mission 
from the Highest. The fact that when the 
Portrait was being painted the national clouds 
were already beginning to be parted by streaks 
of sunshine, may have lent inspiration to the 
thought. I turn, however, from the critical 
to the human. I will view this not as the 
portrait of a nation, but as the portrait of a 
man, and I will only consider in it those 
qualities which belong to the individual heart; 
Judah has passed away, but Job abides. 

There have been four typical notes of 
despair in the region of literature. The first 
and most intense is the voice of Omar Khay- 
yam. It is despair absolute, despair of life all 
round, despair whose only relief is to drown 
itself in wine. The second is the Book of 
Ecclesiastes. I would call it despair of results. 
It does not deny that it is a pleasant thing to 
see the light of the sun; it does not dispute 
that there is a time to dance as well as a time 
to weep; but it asks, What is the good of it; 
does it not all end in vanity! The third is 


JOB THE PATIENT 351 


the cry of Pascal. It is despair of everything 
finite—finite reason, finite love, finite pleasure ; 
the only possible joy is joy in God. The 
fourth is that dramatic portraiture which we 
call the Book of Job. I would describe it as 
the despair of old theories. It is the /east 
despondent of the group. It does not say 
that the world is bad; it does not say that 
life is vanity; it does not even say that finite 
things cannot bring joy. What it does say is 
that all the past theories to explain the evils 
of the universe have been utterly powerless 
to account for these evils, that none of them 
is fit to sustain the weight of human woes, and 
that all of them put together are inadequate 
to wipe the tear from a single eye. The Book 
of Job is not strictly a pessimistic book. It 
does not despair of the universe—spite of all 
its sorrows! What it does despair of is the 
adequacy of any one of man’s existing theories, 
or of all these theories united, to furnish a 
solution of its sorrows. It does not deny that 
there may be summer somewhere beyond the 
sea; but it refuses to accept the doctrine that 


352 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


any of the previous swallows have ever touched 
the gilded shore. 

Now, observe carefully why the Book of 
Job rejects old theories of the origin of pain. 
It is because it has found a newtheory. All 
the former ones had explained suffering as the 
result of defect in the creature. Here, the bold 
view is advanced that it had its origin in a 
need felt by the Creator—the Divine need for 
love. With startling originality, and for the 
first time in history, this book declares that the 
pains of earth were born in heaven, that they 
originated in the counsels beyond the veil. 
Let us stand before this Picture in the Great 
Gallery; it is one of the most striking, not 
only in all Scripture, but in all literature! It 
reveals in the foreground a day in heaven. It 
is a great day—a day of presentations. All 
quarters of the universe are represented. Each 
has sent up a deputy to stand before the throne 
of God. Looking round the vast assembly, 
the eye of the Almighty lights upon a strange 
figure; it is that of Satan. ‘Where do you 
come from,’ says the Almighty ; ‘what part of 


JOB THE PATIENT 353 


the universe has made you its representative ?’ 
Satan answers, ‘I represent the earth—the 
length of it, the breadth of it.” ‘Not in its 
whole extent,’ says the Almighty; ‘there is a 
man called Job down in the land of Uz who 
loves Me fervently.’ ‘Oh!’ cries Satan, ‘nobody 
loves you for yoursel//—not even Job! You 
have made it worth while to serve you. You 
have given to those who obey you houses and 
brethren and lands. You have crowned them 
with glory and honour; you have promised 
them long life and prosperity. Take away 
from Job the dowry he gets for loving you— 
take away the rich possessions that have 
rewarded his fidelity, and he will curse you to 
your face!’ 

The Almighty accepts this criticism. Satan 
has put his hand upon a real weakness of 
the Hebrew race—its association of Divine 
love with temporal rewards. God tells Satan 
to go forth and create a set of new conditions 
—conditions unfavourable to Man’s love of the 
Divine. He bids him put this man Job under 
a testing probation—a probation in which he 

Z 


354 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


will be denuded of every outward joy and 
made to experience the fact that a man may 
serve the Lord and get nothing in return. So 
Satan goes out from the presence of the Lord, 
and in the changing of Job’s environment he 
constructs a unique figure in the Old Testa- 
ment Gallery—a figure which has the stamp 
of a distinctively new conception. Job is the 
only man of the Old Gallery whose mission is 
simply to bear. All the other men of the 
group are men of action. Enoch had the 
wreath of immortality; but Enoch’s life was a 
walk with God. Elijah had a chariot of fire; 
but Elijah was the prophet of fire. Noah rose 
above the floods of fortune; but Noah was an 
active shipbuilder. Abraham was _ highly 
blessed; but Abraham was the founder of a 
kingdom. Moses communed with God on the 
Mount as a man talks with his friend; but 
Moses was the maker of practical laws. All 
these were great by reason of their working. 
But this man Job comes upon the scene to do 
nothing—simply to bear. To the eye of the 
beholder it does not appear that the bearing has 


JOB THE PATIENT 355 


any practical purpose. He is not weighted, as 
Isaac was, with the cares of a household. He 
is weighted seemingly for the sake of nobody, 
but just with a view to his own pain. What 
we see is a process of divestiture—and the 
reason is known only to the spectator. He 
comes to be dismantled. One by one the 
beautiful robes are taken off, until every thread 
of former majesty is gone, until the king 
becomes a pauper and the millionaire a beggar 
for bread. Let us follow the process, 

First the outermost robe is removed— 
worldly wealth takes wings and vanishes 
away; the labour of the olive fails and the 
field supplies no meat. Job stands the test; 
his love for God wavers not. Then an inner 
robe is removed—the ties of home are broken 
by death. His had been a happy domestic 
circle—a circle of family reunions. They met 
at these reunions once a year in the rotation of 
each son’s birthday. We all know the increas- 
ing sadness of these gatherings—the sadness 
of hearing voices that are no longer there. 
Job had to bear this. Year by year the vacant 


356 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


chairs increased in prominence, and the touch 
of vanished hands became more frequent. 
Still he wavers not; no cry escapes his lips. 
Then a more inward robe still is taken—health 
breaks; bodily strength gives way. I call 
that a more inward privation, because it pre- 
vented him from recuperating. When a man’s 
heart goes down, it may rise again if his body 
keeps up; but if his body falls too, the heart 
will zo¢ rise. That is what I understand our 
Lord to mean when He says, ‘If the sa/¢ has 
lost its savour, wherewith shall zt be salted!’ 
—if the vital stream itself is low, what can 
restore joy! Still Job blanches not. Nocom- 
plaint falls from him. His deepest sense is 
that of acquiescence in the Divine will, ‘The 
Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away: 
blessed be the name of the Lord!’ 

Then comes the removal of a fourth gar- 
ment—human sympathy. Job’s friends visit 
him, and, in accordance with the Jewish view 
of suffering, they assume that he must be a 
special sinner. At first by gesture, and then by 
words, they convey their impression that he has 


JOB THE PATIENT 357 


done something to deserve it. And now for 
the first time his great heart gives way. You 
have seen a cloud that has hovered overhead 
all the afternoon touched at last by a freezing 
vapour and burst forth in torrents. So is it 
with Job. He has borne up all through the 
day—borne poverty, bereavement, sickness; 
but, when the freezing vapour touches him, the 
fountains of the great deep are opened and 
the flood descends. He has endured calamity ; 
but that his calamity should be made a sign of 
worthlessness is zoo much! The explosion is 
simply terrific; it sweeps all before it. Yet it 
is not illogical; there is a method in its gusts 
of passion. Let me try to gather up the 
threads of argument which the blast carries on 
its bosom. Let me endeavour to paraphrase 
the spirit of these remarkable utterances in 
which Job expresses his indignation at the 
theory of his friends. 

‘Tell me not,’ he cries, ‘that I have deserved 
it! Do not say that in any special sense I 
have incurred the displeasure of the Almighty! 
I know I have sinned after the manner of 


358 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


Adam’s vace. How shall a man be just before 
God!—if called to the bar of judgment, could 
he answer for one, of a thousand, faults! But 
that is not what you mean. You want me to 
believe that I have been a sfeczal sinner, a 
sinner above the average. My life refutes 
the charge. Measured by the common 
standard, my record is pure. The blessing of 
him that was ready to perish came upon me, 
and I caused the heart of the widow to sing 
for joy. I was eyes to the blind and feet to 
the lame. When the poor heard, then they 
blessed me; when the eye saw, then it gave 
witness. I delivered the fatherless and the 
widow and him that had no helper. Mine 
integrity I will hold fast and never let it go; 
my heart will not reproach me as long as I 
live. But suppose it were otherwise, suppose 
I were the deep-dyed sinner you picture, is this 
pain the way to convict me! If your God 
wishes me to feel my sin, why does He send 
me a physical suffering and physical weakness 
which make it impossible for me to feel any- 
thing at all! Why does He seal up my 


JOB THE PATIENT 359 


transgressions in a bag—where they cannot 
be seen! Why does He sew mine iniquities 
in sackcloth—where they cannot be felt! 
Why does He break me with a tempest if He 
wants me to have a vivid consciousness of 
anything whatever! Does the sense of sin 
come from mutilation, from curtailment, from 
paralysis of the nerves! Does it not come 
from expansion, from exaltation, from increas- 
ing nearness to God! If I am to abhor 
myself and repent in dust and ashes, it must 
be, not in the hour of depression, but in the 
hour of revelation—the hour when I meet 
with God. I cannot accept your explanation 
of my great and grievous pain,’ 

But now, in the light of this outcry, the 
question arises, Why do we speak of Job’s 
patience? He has borne bravely three 
calamities—the three sent from God; why 
has he sunk before the one sent by Man? He 
has accepted penury, bereavement, sickness; 
why has he cried out at the mere suggestion 
that these are penalties; and why, in spite of 


that vociferation, has his name been handed 


360 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


down as a synonym for patience! He has 
stood the hurricane and the tempest; but he 
has been made to cry out by the lashing of a 
single wave! Does not the fact of being 
fretted by so weak a foe deprive him of all 
right to be the representative of those who 
wait for God ? 

I answer, No; and I feel sure that the 
answer will be echoed by the Great Gallery. 
I am convinced that, in the view of the artist, 
the patience of Job is never so conspicuous as 
in his outcry. Not in spite of, but by reason 
of, that outcry has he earned his right to a 
place among those who wait for God. Why 
did Job cry out? Was it not in the zuterest of 
patience. Was it not patience that made him 
cry out. His friends wanted to vod him of his 
patience—to take away his power to wait 
without a veason, Is not that just the defini- 
tion of intellectual patience—the power to 
trust when there is no light, the ability to 
possess one’s soul in the absence of all 
explanation of that which afflicts it. Unless 
we grasp this thought, the personality of Job 





JOB THE PATIENT 361 


is meaningless—he is simply an impatient 
child. But if his impatience springs from the 
fact that his friends wish to rob him of his 
patience, if his outcry is caused by his desire to be 
allowed to wait for God, then, religiously and 
artistically, the whole Portrait is illuminated 
and the claim of Job to his traditional virtue 
receives triumphant vindication. 

Now, the friends of Job are really in this 
position. They want to alter his attitude of 
patience. They say: ‘It is not enough for you 
to believe that it will be all right some day. 
You must be able to trace the cause of your 
calamity. You must be able to put your hand 
upon some dark deed of your past life, or’— 
as Elihu puts it—‘upon some unspoken 
principle of evil which has not yet issued ina 
deed, but which God sees in the silence of your 
soul,’ Put yourself in the place of Job under 
these circumstances. Imagine that you were 
passing through a season of bereavement. The 
light of your eyes has been extinguished, and 
you are sitting disconsolate in a silent room. 
Suddenly a solemn bell rings; and, draped in 


362 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


black, there enter three figures — Eliphaz, 
Bildad, and Zophar. They take you by the 
hand and say: ‘ My friend, God is dealing 
with you in chastisement. You have been too 
fond of the world. You have been living for 
the hour. You have been giving to earthly 
things the honour which is due to His name. 
Therefore He has spoken to you in His anger; 
He has withered your gourd. Humble your- 
self,and confess your sin!’ Would you not be 
disposed to answer: ‘Am I dound to take such 
a view! In a world where so much seems 
arbitrary, where for a time “the tabernacles of 
robbers prosper,’ where the good are often 
clothed in sackcloth and the wicked wear the 
purple robe, am I bound to believe that this is 
a chastisement to me! Will you not let me 
keep my patzence! Will you not let me trust 
my God without a theory! Will you not let 
me believe that in some way unknown to me 
things are working together for good! Why 
do you deny me the privilege of the men who 
watt for God!’ 

Even such is the voice of Job. He utters a 


= 


JOB THE PATIENT 363 


protest in favour of patience. He appeals 
from the God of his friends to his own God. 
He says, in the spirit of a Greater : ‘My Father! 
behold, Thou comest to me in clouds! Life 
has been overcast for me; the hosannahs are 
hushed, the palm-leaves are withered, the 
friends of summer days have made their flight 
in the winter. Men want me to ¢race Thee, 
“Prophesy unto us, thou Christ; who is he 
that smote thee?” But I will mot trace 
Thee, “The cup which my Father has given 
me to drink, shall I not drink it!” I accept 
in the darkness the burden Thou hast laid 
upon me; I take it unexplained. I come to 
Thee in the night—the unvindicated night. 
I come in the cold that has no explanation, in 
the snow that is not accounted for. I accept 
Thee in Thy mean attire, in Thine unattractive 
raiment, in Thy repulsive dress. I do not seek 
to comprehend Thee; I take Thee with Thy 
mystery. Though Thou slay me, yet will 
I trust in Thee, and believe that I keep Thy 
favour.’ 


But there is a second respect in which the 


364 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


patience of Job is vindicated by his outcry. 
Can there be any patience without a certain 
amount of inward outcry! If Job has ceased 
to ‘ pray for his friends ’—in other words, if he 
has ceased to care what his friends think of 
him—where is there room for patience! Is it 
not just this presence of the inner outcry which 
distinguishes the patience of Christ from what 
St. John’s Gospel calls ‘the peace which the 
world gives’—Stoicism. The Stoic says: ‘If 
you will only keep down your feelings, if you 
will only practise the restraining of the bird 
when it is about to fly, you will come in course 
of time to have zo emotions; you will be able 
to walk in the funeral cortége, fearless, tearless, 
passionless.’ Yes, and I would add, ‘patience- 
less. For, what you have lost in this case is 
really patience. You have ceased to waz? for 
anything ; you have given up the game. You 
see a man undergoing one of those little 
operations which flesh is heir to. He never 
winces, ‘What admirable nerve!’ you say. 
And yet, in reality, the calmness comes from 


exactly the opposite cause. The nerve, so far 


JOB THE PATIENT 365 


from being admirable, is dead; the man has 
lost the necessity for patzence. 

There is a question which must often have 
occurred to an inquiring mind. Why is it that 
we Christians, to whom the patience of Christ 
is a watchword and the surrender of His will 
a glory, are yet eager to select that part of 
His life in which the outcry is most loud and 
the struggle most apparent? Why do we 
make our pilgrimage in crowds to the Garden 
of Gethsemane? Why is to us the dearest 
spot, the most sacrificial spot, precisely that 
place where He poured forth His soul with 
strong crying and tears? We could under- 
stand why men who admire patience should 
repair to the scene of the death of Socrates; 
but it seems a strange thing that they should 
always take their journey to a place of human 
- outcry like the Garden of Gethsemane ! 

But the answer, I think, is clear. We go to 
Gethsemane in the zuterest of patience. We 
feel that the outcry is the proof of the sacrifice. 
Socrates has become deadened in the nerve 
that gives pain; therefore he has no outcry. 


366 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


But the outcry of Jesus proves that He has oz 
lost His nerve, not lost His youth, not lost 
His love of human things. It is easy to be 
crucified by the world if you have ceased to 
love the world. It is easy to be crucified by 
your friends if your friends are looked upon 
by you as simply so many flies to be brushed 
aside and forgotten. But the glory of Geth- 
semane is that life is still beautiful to Jesus— 
that, with all its sins and sorrows, it still keeps 
to Him its pristine glow—that the colour has 
not gone out of the flower, nor the song of the 
bird become silent, nor the freshness vanished 
from the breezes. The world is yet woith 
living in—bright and beautiful with possi- 
bilities, fair with promise, radiant with hope. 
That is what makes it so hard to be crucified 
by the sons of men; that is what gives value 
to the sacrifice. We measure the patience by 
the strength of the cry. 

Job also had the spirit of youth. However 
dark his sky, he had not lost his sense of life’s 
possibilities. Deep down in his heart there 
was the conviction that the world in which he 


JOB THE PATIENT 367 


suffered was an unnatural world. He felt that 
things ought not so to be, and that therefore 
they would not a/ways so be. Clear through 
the night his voice kept ringing: ‘I know that 
my Vindicator liveth, and that He shall stand 
at the last upon the earth; and, though the 
process of destruction penetrate even beneath 
the skin, yet in my flesh shall I see God, whom 
I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall 
behold and not another!’ These are the 
words of hope, not despair. They show 
that the nerve is zo¢ dead, that the love of life 
is not extinguished, that the spirit of youth 
remains. If patience implies an outcry, it is 
because it implies an out/oof. It refrains 
from tracing the way, but none the less does it 
believe in the goal. So long as aman keeps 
his love, he will keep his capacity for pain; 
but he will also keep his freedom from despair. 
Where love is, there is no despair. The wind 
may be raging fierce and cold around us, there 
may be no star in our night and no present 
rest in our journey—but if /ove be not 
quenched, the ground for hope is still abiding. 


308 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


The gate of egress may be unseen, the avenue 
of outlook may be undetected, but already 
beyond the tombstone there will gleam the 
Garden, and above the blood-stained heights of 
Calvary there will glitter the sunlit peaks of 
Olivet. 


ORD, help me to keep my dove! What- 
ever else I lose, may I never lose ¢hat! 
Though all the lights go out from my life, 
let not ¢hzs torch be extinguished! There 
is a peace which comes by the death of patience 
—by ceasing any longer to wait or to expect. 
There is a peace which is zo¢ patience, because 
it Jooks for nothing, longs for nothing, prays 
for nothing—a peace which is painless because 
it is numb, and is free from struggle because it 
is dead. I would not have that gift, O my 
Father! I have passed through the autumn 
woods and heard no waving of the leaves, 
not because there was no wind to blow, but 
because there was no sap to nourish. I would 
not have ¢hat gift, OQ my Father! That is the 





JOB THE PATIENT 369 


peace of the grave. But Thy peace is the 
peace of the ocean. It is the calm that holds 
depths beneath it. It is not the rest of life- 
lessness, but the rest of balance. Thy patience 
is the patience not of spentness, but of 
expectancy; it rests ‘in hope.’ Bring me 
that peace of Thine,O God! Bring me the 
peace of pulsation, the calm of courage, the 
endurance that springs from energy! Bring 
me the fortitude of fervour, the repose through 
inner radiance, the tenacity that is born of 
trust! Bring me the silence that comes from 
serenity, the gentleness that is bred of joy, the 
quiet that has sprung from quickened faith! 
When I hear Zee in the whirlwind, there 
will be a great calm! 


ZA 


Printed by T. and A. Consravim, Printers to His Majesty, 


at the Edinburgh University Press 


) ql 7 
72-43. 


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